Impacts of Asia’s Rise on African and Latin American Trade: Projections to 2030

Rapid growth in Asia’s emerging economies has boosted export earnings of resource-rich economies over the past decade. Will those high growth rates continue, and how will structural changes in Asia alter the relative importance of their imports of primary products? This paper projects production and trade patterns of Africa and Latin America to 2030 under various growth and policy scenarios in Asia, using the GTAP model of the global economy. We compare a projection assuming relatively conservative economic growth in China and India with a projection in which those economies continue to grow rapidly (albeit slower than in the previous decade). We then compare our conservative growth baseline with two alternative scenarios: one assumes Africa and Latin America choose to invest more in public agricultural R&D to take advantage of Asian import growth; the other assumes China and India dampen that growth by restricting their imports of key foodgrains. The final section summarizes the results and draws out policy implications for Latin America and Africa.