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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