Faced with the pandemic, many countries are slowing down and sometimes even preventing the sale of their production to their neighbors.
Microchip-producing countries, for example, tend to favor their domestic market and reduce sales abroad.
Nicolas Barré takes stock of a current economic issue.
This is one of the many unexpected consequences of the Covid crisis, never before have so many countries put barriers to the sale of their production abroad.
It's protectionism backwards!
Protectionism, we know: when a country puts up barriers to slow down the entry of foreign products into its territory, to protect itself from competition.
What is developing at top speed right now is the opposite.
Countries which slow down and sometimes even prevent the sale of their production to their neighbors.
Since the start of the pandemic, 80 countries have put in place such export restrictions according to the World Trade Organization.
And it's unheard of since World War II.
We see it with vaccines, it's every man for himself.
We have seen it with masks or respirators.
When they started to run out, the producing countries kept them for themselves.
And the reflex everywhere has been to say: quickly, let's become self-sufficient.
Which is easier said than done.
We see it right now on electronic chips.
As demand explodes and shortages are observed, large producing countries tend to favor their domestic market and reduce sales abroad.
This backwards protectionism is also a weapon.
The Chinese have started to restrict their exports of rare earths, metals crucial to electronics, to the United States.
Which have blocked sales of electronic components to the Chinese.
In short, instead of putting barriers at the entrance, we put them at the exit.
And is it effective?
This is an illusion and it is worrying because a single country rarely, if ever, masters the production of all the components that go into the manufacture of a product.
Vaccines are a good example.
It takes 400 components to make a vaccine.
When the European Union threatened to block exports of Astrazeneca vaccines to the United Kingdom, London threatened to block the sale of lipids essential to the manufacture of Pfizer's vaccines, lipids that come out of a single factory in Europe, located in the south of the United Kingdom.
This backwards protectionism is a temptation that is developing thanks to the crisis.
More and more countries are using it.
It's popular.
It flatters the nationalist spirit.
But it is ultimately a lose-lose game.
The opposite of free trade which does not have a good press.