The Ongoing trade offensive and possible gendered ramifications
- Sona Mitra
Beginning April 2025, President Donald Trump initiated a series of aggressive tariff measures aimed specifically at regenerating the US manufacturing, but also to reshape the US trade relationships. The imposition of minimum 10% tariff for trading with the US as well as laying out a detailed plan of tariffs for specific blocs and countries even to the extent of 45%, the US was all set to have major impact on the global trade dynamics, trade balance of nations and would have resulted in further deepening the global debt crises.
While Trump’s preference for bilateralism over multilateralism and undermining of institutions highlighted in his current trade policies, clearly marks a departure from the classical economic wisdom of free trade benefitting the world and lifting the world’s poor out of poverty, Trump administration’s defense is about providing a fillip to the US economy undergoing an economic crisis. It is needless to mention that the free market international trade theories and policies championed by a section of free trade enthusiasts including policymakers and economists who ignored the pitfalls of free trade between unequal nations and blocs in the past, despite not having the desired effects on distribution, redistribution and equality of wealth between nations, are also wondering about the potential impact of such a U-turn by the USA.
However, these plans have now been halted in the last couple of weeks, triggered by China’s reactions to the US announcements. The US-China tariff wars and trade negotiations reached a bizarre peak, an interim diplomatic stalemate and a subsequent reduction of tariffs for the next 90 days. Given the giants they are in the world trade (USA and China together hold 23.3% of global trade as of 2023), this is having a significant impact on the world economy. The World Bank and the IMF has already revised the growth rates of the world economy downwards for the current financial year and has indicated a potential fallout on disturbing the stability of the global supply chains, increased production costs, slow and reduced investments in exports due to a reduced investor confidence, increased market volatility and foreign exchange fluctuations, possible inflation – all signs of a looming global recession!
Several speculations have been in order regarding these announcements by the US and retaliation by China. One of those is about the USA strategizing on an economic reordering of the world, administering sudden shocks and creating short-term mayhem in the world economy to reap long-term benefits for themselves, ensuring greater control over world trade in future. A recent Guardian piece has noted that for the US, it is not new to create short-term chaos to reap long term wins[1]. Whatever the conjectures, if this stalemate between the US-China trade relations continues, there are signs that predictions of a recession might come true.
This may be disastrous for the world, especially the global south and its vulnerable sections of the population[2]. Studies clearly show that the world is yet to fully recover from the 2008 Global Financial crisis (GFC) and the economic losses incurred from the recent Covid-19 pandemic and it would now possibly get plunged into further crisis which would have its own social, economic and political ramifications including a devastating impact on women, whether in or out of paid work.
Women have always been the largest cohort to be impacted by the big blows to the world economy. Evidence from the GFC 2008 and the crisis caused due to the pandemic documented and highlighted large-scale adverse impact on women on account of massive loss of employment in women-dominated sectors such as export manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and education services. Women were pushed to take up precarious work arrangements within informal setups bereft of any social security nets, widening male-female wage disparities, further deterioration of working conditions, recurring job losses, and an eventual retreat from the labour force due to discouraged worker effects[3].
Further, women bear the greatest brunt of the attempts by the state to reduce their fiscal deficits by cutting down on social expenditures. Austerity measures adopted across most nations of the world, both in the global North and South, to survive the crisis led to a cut-down in provisions of crucial public services and basic amenities in healthcare, childcare, education, mitigation of gender-based violence, and other important social welfare programmes. These hit women harder, as the burden of supplementing the cuts in public provisions of these services increases women’s burden of unpaid and care work phenomenally, given that women's roles in the economy are deeply stereotyped as primary caregivers. It compounds the time-poverty that women are constantly struggling with[4].
Documented evidence and a wide range of research clearly show that women’s contribution to the unpaid and care economy often subsidises the state, which fails to provide essential public services, as mentioned earlier, to compensate for the absence of such services. Needless to mention, the impact is felt more by women belonging to low-income households, religious, racial, and other minority ethnic groups across the countries of the global South.
The recession at this time absolutely also runs the possibility of intensifying the current poly-crisis[5] that the world is struggling with. It has been amply documented that the indigenous communities, minorities – racial, religious, ethnic, and women are suffering and bearing the shocks of such a crisis. The mindless trade and tariff negotiations initiated by the Trump administration clearly reflect a lack of consideration for the world economy, let alone the concerns of the global South and its vulnerable cohorts of the population.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/07/donald-trump-world-economy-shock-us
[1] multiple crises or complex challenges such as the climate challenges, conflict and war, pandemics and economic instability that unfold simultaneously, interacting and amplifying each other, making it difficult to address the challenges even through positive state interventions to prevent a systemic collapse