Trade war

It was showtime last week for Donald Trump's trade extravaganza.

- BOO CHANCO

He called it Liberation Day against what he calls decades of unfair trade practices by America's trade partners. Trump's weapon of choice is the tariff, which he has called the most beautiful word in the dictionary.

This is how The New York Times morning email explains the newly imposed tariffs: "The administration claims they are based on other countries' trade barriers against the United States. In reality, the levies are based on how much more another country exports to America than it imports from it... The difference between exports and imports doesn't necessarily reflect trade barriers; Americans may simply want to buy more stuff from, say, Japan than the Japanese want to buy from the United States."

Economists, conservative and liberal, have been saying that a trade war unleashed by Trump's tariff regime will bring untold negative consequences to the world economy. Trump is determined to bring the American economy to the McKinley era of the early 1990s.

But this has low impact on the Philippines. That's basically because we are not an export-oriented economy. Ours is around 70 percent driven by domestic consumption. And Trump imposed the second lowest tariff on us at 17 percent among ASEAN countries, with Singapore getting the baseline rate of 10 percent.

We aren't a major trading partner of the US. Our share of US imports is a minuscule 0.4 percent of total imports. But the US is the Philippines' top destination for our exports, accounting for 16.6 percent of our total exports. The US is extremely important for our small export sector.