Region’s leaders against protectionism

Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon M. Lopez said that the Asean leaders might release a general statement against protectionism as the Asean Summit concludes tomorrow.

Lopez told reporters on the sidelines of the Prosperity for All Summit 2017 that there was a draft of the statement calling for regional integration.

While he did not drop any specific quote from the statement, he said that Southeast Asian leaders sought to push forward the benefits of integration, which helps out more people as opposed to inward-looking policies.

“It has something to do with the benefits of integration, which go down to the majority. It’s a better quality of livelihood in the grassroots. Any move to reverse that track toward globalization is really more difficult,” he said yesterday.

He did not specify if the statement would mention any specific countries that called for protectionism.

When asked for further clarification, he said in a text message to the Inquirer that the draft “might change.”

However, recent events have seen the rise of protectionist rhetoric in the global arena, a battle cry which has been popular especially during national elections such as those in the United States and France.

Nontariff barriers are some of the ways that protectionism could take form. These are restrictions to imports or exports through means other than the imposition of tariffs such as import quotas or unnecessary customs requirements.

According to a joint study by the Economic Research Institute for Asean and East Asia and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), trade barriers have multiplied even though tariff rates have gone down over the years.

These nontarrif barriers have increased more than threefold from 1,634 measures in 2000 to 5,975 in 2015, even though average tariff rates of Asean countries fell from 8.9 percent in 2000 to 4.5 percent in 2015.

The Philippines is hosting as the chair of the Asean this year. A draft of the chair’s statement received flak recently for adopting a subdued language in discussing the territorial dispute with China, a row which affected not only the Philippines, but other Asean member-states as well.

The Philippine government has been soft in asserting its territorial claims even when the international tribunal ruled that China had no legal claim over the South China Sea. This followed President Duterte’s pivot away from the United States and toward China, Russia and Japan. —ROY STEPHEN C. CANIVEL