“The tone on the China section of [Canada’s] strategy is not nuanced…the strategy appears to acknowledge that this approach could increase the risk of economic disputes between the two countries.”
Paul Samson discusses trade with China and “friendshoring” on The Agenda
Reforming Institutions to Stave Off Geoeconomic Fragmentation
The run-up to the 2023 G20 meeting put a spotlight on large emerging economies, including China and India, as well as the failure of international economic organizations to keep up with major changes in these economies. To avoid “geoeconomic fragmentation,” reforms are needed to make the rules-based trading system predictable, fair and effective in avoiding the escalation of trade disputes into trade wars, as Tim Sargent, Paul Samson and Hector Torres have argued.
As countries seek to decouple their economies from China and others through “friendshoring,” wrote Torres in the Financial Times, they are ironically creating a world more like China than one shaped by their values. Meanwhile, Canada’s new Indo-Pacific strategy raises more questions than it answers about a potential trade agreement with India and continued economic disputes with China, as Samson noted in the Financial Post.