"After the U.S.-China trade feud slashed global trade growth to its slowest pace since 2009 last year (+1.2% in volume terms), we expect the Covid19 outbreak to act as a major trade barrier in 2020," the report said.

The report went on to say: "According to our calculations, the ongoing containment measures to respond to the Covid19 outbreak are already equivalent to +0.7pp of additional tariffs on goods — bringing the world tariff average to a notional 6.5% at end of Q1 2020. In other words, in one quarter, global trade already suffered from the equivalent of the full-year trade war between the US and China in 2019."

"We estimate that losses of trade in goods and services could amount to USD320bn per quarter of business disruption (see Figure 1). Each quarter of Covid-19 related trade losses in 2020 is thus comparable to the annual impact of the U.S.-China trade dispute on world tariffs in 2019. On the goods side, our main assumptions take into account the lockdowns in China and Italy and limited containment measures in other countries," it highlighted. (ILKHA)