The UN’s top trade official has urged the US to spare the world’s poorest countries from high tariffs, saying they will damage vulnerable economies without raising significant sums for the Treasury or shrinking the US trade deficit.
Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), told the Financial Times that while some of the world’s least developed countries depended on exports to the US, the dollar amounts they shipped were too small to have much impact on the US trade gap.
“Take Madagascar,” she said, noting that it was one of the world’s poorest countries with GDP per capita of just $509. “If you try to calculate how much of the US trade deficit it represents, you will get zero, because you can’t even round it up to 0.1 per cent . . .