Trump's tariffs: Can M'sia secure a fair U.S. trade deal?

AWANI

Can Malaysia negotiate similar tariff rates to its ASEAN neighbours? Dr Ida Md Yasin from Putra Business School discusses key factors to consider in talks with Washington.

Transcript

00:00As China moves forward with trade talks, we now look at America's other trading partners.

00:06Now, with more nations beginning to lock down trade deals with the US, what can Malaysia get?

00:12Associate Professor Dr Ida Ahmad Yassin from Putra Business School

00:16unpacks how any talks should go down with Washington.

00:22Since we are a trading nation, we must have our niche products or our niche services.

00:28There are certain things that we need to protect too.

00:31In this case, I think, Faye, when we talk about negotiating with the US,

00:37they are, of course, our big trading partner, the top three.

00:41But again, we are talking about short term and also long term in terms of the impact of negotiation.

00:47What I'm afraid is when we change certain things in terms of the policy, the impact is a long term impact.

00:54And we don't know whether there is a change later in the US administration and probably they are going to change again.

01:02So this is something which is unstable.

01:05So I know from my personal point of view, I think we should, how do I say, not so easy to change our policy

01:13because at the end of the day, we may have to bear the impact of it.

01:17I'm talking about the negative impact.

01:19So we need to weigh these things, not just in the short term, I believe.

01:23We have to weigh in the long term.

01:25Because when we negotiate to buy certain products, for example, at a high price and so on,

01:31we have to bear with it for a long period of time.

01:34So I think we should think about the long term impact if we change our policy towards the US.

01:40Ida said services must also be considered in negotiations for a balanced and fair deal.

01:48Another thing that I think I would like to bring out here is when we have a negotiation with the US,

01:54it is that we are always talking about goods, only goods,

01:57because the US is saying that we export goods to the US more than US export to Malaysia.

02:03So of course, it is an imbalanced trade in this case.

02:05However, in international trade, we have to consider there are two components,

02:10goods as well as services.

02:12So it seems that we are not talking about the services part of it,

02:16because when it comes to data, we can see from the stats department,

02:19Malaysia imports services from the US more than US imports services from Malaysia.

02:26So actually, at the end of the day, the trade between Malaysia and US,

02:29if you consider both goods and services, will actually balance.

02:32But it is not balanced because we take only goods.

02:36We didn't take the services part of it.

02:38So I think that is something that we can bring onto the table.

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