Trade friction to weigh on Latin American economies: Scholars

BEIJING - The US escalation of trade friction with China will incur negative impact on Latin American economies, according to scholars.

Higher tariffs as well as US restrictions on investment between the two countries will send the global trade and investment liberalization process that continued during the past century into a backwater, said Enrique Dussel Peters, coordinator of the Center for China-Mexico Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The trade friction will shrink global trade, risk threatening global economic growth, and weigh on the export-oriented Latin American economies, which already suffered from trade weakness, said Yue Yunxia, a scholar with the Institute of Latin American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Andres Borquez Basaez, director of Chinese Studies Program at the Institute of International Studies with the University of Chile, said the world economy was an interdependent system and US-China trade friction would cause damage to developing countries.

Yue said some Latin American countries would take a direct hit as falling trade volumes could erode the countries' revenues from Panama Canal passage charges.