"Foxconn is halting new work rotations for its Chinese employees at its Apple iPhone factories in India, and sending Taiwanese workers instead, according to five people familiar with Foxconn’s operations in India. Shipments of specialized manufacturing equipment meant for India have also been held up in China, the sources told Rest of World.

The development is likely to disrupt iPhone assembly lines in the Foxconn factories in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which produce iPhones as part of Apple’s efforts to diversify production away from China. Some of the sources said the Chinese government is responsible for the suspensions of worker deployments and equipment exports.

“Currently, the equipment and manpower are not allowed to go over [to India],” one of the sources told Rest of World. “And India doesn’t have the technology to produce the equipment.”

https://restofworld.org/2025/china-foxconn-factoriesfoxconn-stops-sending-chinese-workers-to-india-iphone-factories/

#China #India #Foxconn #iPhone #TradeWars

Jean Chrétien, who served as the 20th prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003: "We also need to reduce Canada’s vulnerability in the first place. We need to be stronger. There are more trade barriers between provinces than between Canada and the United States. Let’s launch a national project to get rid of those barriers! And let’s strengthen the ties that bind this vast nation together through projects such as real national energy grid.

We also have to understand that Mr. Trump isn’t just threatening us; he’s also targeting a growing list of other countries, as well as the European Union itself, and he is just getting started. Canada should quickly convene a meeting of the leaders of Denmark, Panama, Mexico, as well as with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to formulate a plan for fighting back these threats.

Every time that Mr. Trump opens his mouth, he creates new allies for all of us. So let’s get organized! To fight back against a big, powerful bully, you need strength in numbers.

The whole point is not to wait in dread for Donald Trump’s next blow. It’s to build a country and an international community that can withstand those blows."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-jean-chretien-canadian-leaders-donald-trump-plan/

#Canada #Sovereignty #Trump #TradeWars #USA #Imperialism

"There is a fourth, more realistic conception of tariffs that has been effective in some key instances. Advocates of this perspective view tariffs as a shield behind which other, mainly domestic policies can work more effectively. Traditionally, trade laws have allowed countries to use tariffs to protect vulnerable sectors or regions under specific conditions, effectively supplementing domestic social policy.

An even more significant example is infant-industry protection, which has worked best when it exists alongside other instruments to incentivize domestic firms to innovate and upgrade. Some notable cases include the late-nineteenth-century United States, post-1960s South Korea and Taiwan, and post-1990s China. In each of these cases, industrial policies went far beyond trade protection, and it is unlikely that tariff barriers on their own would have produced the gains each of these economies experienced.

Similarly, green policies often require some trade barriers to make them economically and politically viable, as in the case of the European Union’s carbon tariffs and the local-content requirements of the US Inflation Reduction Act. In all these cases, tariffs play a supporting role for other policies that serve a broader purpose, and can be a small price to pay for the larger benefit.

Unfortunately, Trump has not offered a domestic agenda of renewal and economic reconstruction in any of these areas, and his tariffs will likely stand – and fail – on their own."

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-has-wrong-concept-of-tariffs-by-dani-rodrik-2025-01

#USA #Trump #Protectionism #TradeWars #Tariffs #PoliticalEconomy

"In 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sum­marised a number of studies that estimated the costs of geoeco­nomic fragmentation (GEF). These ranged from 0.9 per cent of global GDP under mild assumptions to as high as 8.5 per cent of global GDP under severe assumptions. There are no exact estimates to be had. These estimates should be contrasted with its biannual global economic forecast, the World Economic Outlook (WEO). The latest edition, of October 2024, penned global growth in 2025 at 3.2 per cent, unchanged from the 2024 estimate and a sliver less than the 3.3 per cent estimate in 2023. With latest economic data from the UK showing no growth and Germany faring equally badly, it is not surprising that global economic output has stagnated. Even if one were to filter out cyclical factors behind such fluctuations in output, the geoeconomic factors loom large in this story. In Britain’s case, growth has nosedived ever since Brexit and Germany’s economic travails are largely due to exorbitant costs of en­ergy. The later phase of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder was as much about sound economic management as it was about cheap energy, most of it from Russia. Once those taps shut, the German economy caught a chill.

Among the bright spots in this bleak scenario are China and India with estimated growth rates of 4.5 per cent and 6.5 per cent respectively in 2025. There are other economies with faster growth but they do not matter for global output as their share of output in the world economy is very small."

https://openthemagazine.com/cover-stories/a-fragmenting-world/

#Globalization #Protectionism #TradeWars #PoliticalEconomy #GeoEconomicFragmentation