I don’t see how South Korea can be considered a low cost manufacturing country especially considering the KORUS FTA has made it cheaper for them to manufacture in the US compared to South Korea:
Trump hasn’t spelled out how he wants to rearrange NAFTA, but the basic idea is to encourage or compel more production in the United States, which would mean less production in places like Mexico. But that would be highly disruptive and would penalize American automakers more than their foreign rivals. Trump could probably rewrite the rules in a way that limits Mexican imports to the United States, for instance. But that doesn’t mean automakers would simply move Mexican factories north of the border. They might look for other low-cost countries instead, such as South Korea, India or China. The Trump administration could pursue trade restrictions on those countries as well, but that becomes a game of free-trade whack-a-mole in which the government is trying to tell multinational companies where to invest their money—hardly the lightly regulated pro-growth environment Trump says he wants to create.
If Trump tries to stop US automakers from producing in Mexico, that doesn’t mean he can stop foreign automakers from operating there. So the government would essentially be raising costs for American firms by forcing them out of Mexico, but not for their global competitors. [Yahoo Finance]
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