Common good is vital: expert

Brookings’ Dollar says cooperation on key public issues bolsters China-US ties

The ballast in the relationship of the world’s two largest economies is their cooperation on the global public goods, which the Trump administration’s “America First” approach is undermining, according to a senior researcher at a US think tank.

Without successful cooperation on issues that matter to the public, it is likely that USChina relations will become more volatile and bounce back and forth on small events, said David Dollar, senior fellow with the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

For years, academics and politicians in Beijing and Washington have agreed that trade relations are the foundation of bilateral ties, given that China and the US are each other’s largest trading partner.

But Dollar said that China’s economy is much less exportdependent today than it was before the global financial crisis in 2008, when the country’s ratio of exports to gross domestic product fell from 32 percent then to about 18 percent last year.

On the US side, exports to China accounts for less than 1 percent of US GDP, and some American companies have complained about a lack of access to China’s markets, according to Dollar.

“It is becoming less true that the economic relationship is the foundation of the overall relationship,” Dollar, who specializes in foreign policy and global economy and development, told China Daily in an interview on Monday.

“I see the ballast in the relationship being the cooperation on global public goods,” he said.

Global public goods include issues such as peace and security, health, climate change, market efficiency and financial stability, according to Bernur Açıkgöz Ersoy, author of Globalization and Global Public Goods published in 2011.

The two most important public goods for the US and China to cooperate on are climate change and free trade, said Dollar, a former World Bank and US Treasury representative to China.

However, US President Donald Trump’s “America first” policy puts little or no value on those public goods, he said.

“We are in danger of losing that ballast now because the Trump administration has a negative view of many global public goods,” Dollar said.

The US-China cooperation on climate change, culminating with the Paris Agreement in 2015, was one of the best examples of the two countries working together for the public good, Dollar said.

David Dollar, senior fellow with the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution