Closing trade will damage US, world growth prospects: Sunil Mittal

NEW DELHI: The tit-for-tat tariff hikes proposed by US and China will impact small businesses that rely on imports, said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of International Chamber of Commerce, urging the world’s largest economy to engage in dialogue with trade partners to resolve issues. Mittal, also chairman of Bharti Enterprises, in a statement on Tuesday said tensions, if unresolved, can be detrimental to all, damaging growth prospects for both US and global markets.

“Open markets underpinned by the rules-based multilateral trading system have been a vital driver of prosperity across the world over the past 50 years. Any erosion of that system will come at quite a cost to us all,” Mittal said.

“A progressive closing of the world’s largest economy to trade will damage both US and global growth prospects. In an interconnected world, international commerce cannot be governed by zero-sum policy decisions. We encourage the US and all its trading partners to find new ways to resolve ongoing trade tensions through multilateral dialogue and without recourse to further tariff increases,” he added.


Mittal said tariff hikes will inevitably impact small businesses that often rely heavily on imported goods and services. “Longstanding US trade policies, such as the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), have been shown to play a key role in supporting the growth of domestic small businesses and associated job creation,” he said