China
For China, the second largest economy in the world, the total tariff rate will climb to 54% within a week, as the U.S. has already announced a 20% on this country earlier this year.
But the average U.S. tariff on Chinese goods will be around 76%, when all factors are taken into account, according to Chad Brown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and chief economist at the State Department for the last year of the Biden administration.
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A female worker produces silk fabric products in front of a winder at a silk production workshop in Nantong, Jiangsu province, China on April 2, 2025. Photo by AFP |
The tariffs would result in an estimated 0.27% drop in China GDP, equivalent to a loss of $53 billion, according to calculations by Niven Winchester, professor of economics at Auckland University of Technology.
“Arguably, President Trump’s tariffs elsewhere will cause the most headaches,” said Ruby Osman, a China expert at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
China on Thursday urged the U.S. to immediately cancel its latest tariffs and vowed countermeasures to safeguard its own interests.
The U.S. move disregards the balance of interests reached in multilateral trade negotiations over the years and the fact that it has long benefited greatly from international trade, China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement, as reported by Reuters.
European Union Chamber of Commerce in China president Jens Eskelund said many companies had adjusted their supply chains specifically to limit their exposure to U.S.-China trade tensions and that “any subsequent restructuring of supply chains will not be possible overnight.”
The extra levies could encourage China to step up its trade with alternative markets, but no other country comes even close to U.S. consumption power, where Chinese producers sell more than $400 billion worth of goods annually.
“Trump’s tariffs certainly won’t help Chinese firms and will cause some real pain in some sectors, but they don’t make any definitive mark on the Chinese economy,” said William Hurst, Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at the University of Cambridge.
“U.S. exports are of declining importance to China. The American tariffs will spur more Chinese trade with other places, from Europe to Southeast Asia and Africa,” he added.
Vietnam
With a tariff rate of 46%, Vietnam’s economy is expected to suffer damage from the tariffs, as it has a large trade exposure to the U.S.
The country’s GDP might fall by almost 1%, or $5 billion, as the result of the tariffs. This means every household will lose around $196.
The White House gave Vietnam a high tariffs due to the U.S.’ high trade deficit with Vietnam. Last year, the deficit was over $123 billion, the White House said.
Vietnam, in response, called the tariffs “unfair” and said that it only imposes an average tariff 9.4% on imports from U.S., much lower than the the reciprocal rates.
Singapore
While Singapore is only hit with a 10% baseline tariffs, the impact is expected to be considerably high for the city-state.
Singapore was “disappointed” to be slapped with U.S. tariffs of 10% despite the wealthy Asian financial hub having a free-trade agreement and running a bilateral trade deficit with the U.S., Singapore’s trade minister Gan Kim Yong said on Thursday.
“Retaliatory import duties will just add cost to our imports,” he said, noting that the government would be reviewing its economic forecasts because of the worsening situation.
Gan said Singapore will try to engage the U.S. to understand President Donald Trump’s areas of concern and see if they can be resolved.
“If there are no specific concerns, then it’s more difficult to argue or to negotiate,” he said.
The U.S. had a goods trade surplus of $2.8 billion with Singapore last year, an 85% increase over 2023, according to the United States Trade Representative website.
Although Trump tariffs exclude some sectors such as semiconductors, some analysts do not expect the policy to last in the long run.
Chua Hak Bin, an economist at Maybank, cautioned that the tariff exemptions currently in place for pharmaceuticals and semiconductors are unlikely to persist for an extended period.
“Clearly, Trump has not made a tariff decision on semiconductors as well as pharmaceuticals, which are both important to Singapore’s manufacturing share and export share,” he said, as cited by The Straits Times.
“I don’t think they will be zero,” he said, adding that he expects further tariffs to currently exempted goods by the end of April or early May.
Economists noted that businesses, both local and regional, might experience shrinking profit margins as they grapple with competing against the low-cost goods flooding in from China.
Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation, said: “If others are now scrambling for new markets, they might find opportunities in your market that never faced much competition in the past. That could easily set off new rounds of protectionism or retaliation.”
Other ASEAN countries
Philip Wee, a senior currency economist at Singapore-based lender DBS Bank, said that the reciprocal tariffs on emerging Asian economies were “notably high,” as reported by Channel News Asia.
Cambodia, a growing economy where 17.8% of people live below the poverty line, is the most severely affected nation in the region, facing a tariff rate of 49%.
The next most impacted country is Laos, which faces a tariff rate of 48%. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) indicates that Laos has a poverty rate of 18.3%.
Myanmar, a country still recovering from a destructive earthquake last Friday and enduring years of civil conflict, is saddled with a tariff rate of 44%.
Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, is subject to a 32% tariff rate, while Thailand, the region’s second-biggest economy, has been assigned a tariff rate of 36%.
This is not the end of the road, and there’s still room for “negotiation, retaliation and further potential escalation”, said OCBC chief economist Selina Ling and ASEAN economists Lavanya Venkateswaran, Ahmad A Enver and Jonathan Ng.
