Washington's homeshoring call set to fall on deaf ears
US President Donald Trump has urged automaker Ford and electronics giant Apple to shift their production from China to the United States to avoid the impact of the administration's high tariffs on Chinese imports. While it sounds like a plausible and workable solution, it goes against the trend of global division of labor that has been in place for many decades, and is set to fail.
The world has witnessed a major shift in industrial production over the past decades from high-cost advanced economies, such as the United States, to the low-cost developing countries, such as China, a process that has benefited both the investing multinationals and the receiving countries.
Such a market-driven rearrangement of the global industrial landscape has played an important role in pushing global economic growth and improving the well-being of people in both developed and developing economies.
