A portion of Vietnam’s rising exports to the U.S. may be Chinese products that were rerouted to evade higher tariff rates.
Evidence of this comes from trade data collected after 2018, as a U.S.-China trade war escalated, according to a research paper from Harvard Business School.
Edmund Malesky, a Duke University professor of political science and one of the authors of the Harvard paper,
estimates that 84% of Vietnam’s increase in manufacturing activity was value-added production. “But there’s a smaller part, maybe 16%,
depending on how you measure it, which is rerouting, which became a concern for the United States,” Malesky said.