Recent changes in the tariff policies of the US and China are likely to affect developing countries in complex ways, according to a column from CEPR. The column argues that pre-existing trade patterns can help predict which countries might respond positively to particular tariff changes.

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Over the past year, developing countries have experienced important changes in their tariff treatment by the world’s two largest economies. The new set of country-specific tariffs imposed by the US has raised trade barriers to imports in general, and has also shuffled countries’ relative positions in the US market. Many developing countries now face especially high “reciprocal” tariffs, while others are subject only to a 10% baseline tariff. Moreover, effective 30 September 2025, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) expired. AGOA had made 32 African countries eligible for duty-free access to the US market for a long list of products, most notably in the apparel sector.

Meanwhile, China’s treatment of imports from developing countries has moved in the other direction. In December 2024, China expanded the list of products eligible for zero tariffs in its preferential programme for the least-developed countries (LDCs).

For the 43 LDCs maintaining diplomatic relations with China, all products now enter China duty-free. In June 2025, China further pledged to expand this duty-free treatment to almost all African countries. If fully implemented, this initiative would eliminate Chinese tariffs on exports of 20 African countries not currently classified as LDCs. The column’s authors, in their recent work (Forge et al. 2024), tested a hypothesis about these effects by analysing the impacts of a wave of tariff reductions targeted at LDCs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They studied 22 waves of tariff cuts by wealthy countries during this period, mostly in the form of expansions of countries’ GSP programmes for LDCs, but also including AGOA.

The key finding was that the impact of a tariff reduction depended heavily on a country’s existing export experience. The analysis was conducted separately for cases with and without export experience, defined as a country already exporting the same product to another importer and/or exporting another product in the same category to the same importer. In the absence of such adjacent trade flows, a tariff reduction was estimated to increase the probability of exporting by only 0.04 percentage points, an impact concentrated among the top 10% largest reductions. In cases with export experience, the effect of a tariff reduction was more than 30 times larger, raising the incidence of trade flows by 1.35 percentage points.

The authors conclude that to predict the possible effects of recent changes in US and Chinese tariffs, a marginal logic should be applied. Industrial clusters that have already built trading relationships with major importers may face meaningful harm from US tariff rises, or benefit from China’s policy changes. But in many other cases, gains or losses in a country’s relative tariff treatment might have little influence on its firms’ entry or exit from the US or Chinese markets.

Source: IndexBox Market Intelligence Platform