John Miller, Author at Trade Data Monitor

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John Miller

138 articles published

Global Trade is Moving On — Without the U.S.

UncategorizedJanuary 20, 2026519Views 0Likes 0Comments

One way of looking at China’s trade economy in December and for the full 2025 year is its export surge, amplified by a weak currency, deflation at home, and inflation in most of the rest of the world. China pumped up total monthly exports 6.6% to $357.8 billion in December from $335.6 billion over the…

TDM’s Top 10 Trade Trends to Watch in 2026

UncategorizedJanuary 13, 2026598Views 0Likes 0Comments

Happy New Year. While we wait on the Supreme Court to rule whether the Trump administration is entitled to apply tariffs on national security grounds, global trade grinds on. We at Trade Data Monitor are paying attention to what’s happening via the prism of official trade statistics. It’s a radically different world than when I started covering…

Silver Bullet: A Special Report on Mining and Metals Trade in Latin America

UncategorizedNovember 12, 2025772Views 0Likes 0Comments

Why China is Still Buying If you’re pessimistic about global trade, you’ve likely been paying too much attention to the Beijing-Washington trade spat. The headline number: In September, Chinese exports to the U.S. declined 27% year-on-year. However, even including that number, China’s monthly exports increased 8.3% year-on-year to $328.6 billion. The truth is that there…

Chinese Exports Down 1.1% in October

UncategorizedNovember 12, 2025743Views 0Likes 0Comments

The Chinese export juggernaut finally started to show the impact of protectionism and weaker Western consumer markets in October. A week after Presidents Trump and Xi settled a new trade deal that cut tariffs and put off their trade war for a year, China reported a 1.1% year-on-year drop in exports to $305.3 billion. To…

Is Global Trade Too Strong for Tariffs?

UncategorizedOctober 15, 2025840Views 0Likes 0Comments

Global Trade Can Take a Punch This month, markets have swerved to adjust to the threat of new U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports. Yet, global trade keeps finding a way. In September, although shipments to the U.S. plummeted, China’s monthly exports increased 8.3% year-on-year to $328.6 billion. One way of looking at the stubborn performance…

Casualties of the U.S.-China Trade War: 36 Million Phones

UncategorizedSeptember 17, 20251KViews 0Likes 0Comments

Please Dial a New Number As U.S. and Chinese negotiators try to find a way out of tariff gridlock, one thing is certain: The smartphone supply chain has shifted significantly, upending the practices and expectations of manufacturers, logistics firms, and retailers. China’s exports of mobile phone fell 11.6% year-on-year in August to 60.8 million sets.…

China Ramps Up Exports to Vietnam Amid Transshipment Worries

UncategorizedAugust 7, 20251KViews 1Like 0Comments

Made in Vietnam (or China) At a time when trade officials around the world are closely watching Vietnam’s evolving place in the global trading system, Chinese exports to the new Asian economic power in June boomed 23.8% year-on-year to $16.3 billion. The U.S.-China trade war has pushed attention of U.S. trade negotiators toward manufacturing powers…

Chinese Demand Falters as Imports Decline

UncategorizedDecember 16, 20242KViews 1Like 0Comments

Trade in a Time of Geopolitical Adjustment The focus of the global trade world is, rightly, on President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. debating and deciding how far they’ll go in enacting new protectionist measures. But an issue that could upend geopolitics -- with unintended consequences that will affect big issues like war and peace,…

Trump Election Gooses Trade– Before Tariffs Hit

UncategorizedNovember 7, 20242KViews 1Like 0Comments

This week’s election of Donald Trump as the U.S.’s 47th president is almost certainly likely to lead to another trade war with China, and further tariffs on American imports. During the campaign, Trump said his favorite word was tariff and floated a universal 10% tariff and specific duties on Chinese imports as high as 60%.…

China Finally Affected by Protectionist Tariffs

UncategorizedOctober 23, 20242KViews 1Like 0Comments

September Rain China posted lackluster trade figures in September, highlighting how it might become slowly less reliant on global commerce as other major economies retrench. Chinese exports increased 2.4% year-on-year, below economists’ expectations of around 6%, to $303.7 billion, while imports increased only 0.3% to $222 billon. The 2024 Boom For most of 2024, Chinese…

50 U.S. States Have 50 Trade Economies

UncategorizedSeptember 24, 20242KViews 1Like 0Comments

The politics of trade in the U.S. have gotten complicated during this century, mainly because deindustrialization in the Rust Belt has cost so many factories and jobs. The free trade consensus of the 1990s that led to NAFTA and China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 is dead. But it shouldn’t be lost on…

China Hikes Metal Exports Amid Record Surplus

UncategorizedJuly 15, 20242KViews 1Like 0Comments

As the business world girds for a fresh wave of trade protectionism and the possibility of a second Trump administration, China bumped up exports of two essential metals. In June, its shipments of steel products increased 20.8% year-on-year by quantity to 8.7 million tons and 3.8% by value to $6.8 billion. Its shipments of unwrought…

Vietnam’s Secret Weapon: Agriculture

UncategorizedMarch 1, 20243KViews 0Likes 0Comments

In a tricky global economy, Vietnamese exports shrank in 2023, but the rising economic power managed to be one of the only countries to increase merchandise exports to China, thanks to a surprising surge in exports of fruits and vegetables, as well as rice, demonstrating the importance of export diversification. The Difficulties of 2023 The country of…

What’s Behind the High-Tech Trade Slump?

UncategorizedFebruary 16, 20242KViews 0Likes 0Comments

It’s not been an easy time for international trade, as a recent report co-authored by Trade Data Monitor and the World Intellectual Property Organization found. High-tech exports are set to decline by 4 percent in 2023, according to the TDM/WIPO analysis. Global and high-tech trade have soared and sunk like rollercoasters since 2019. After…

China Hikes Iron Ore, Copper Imports Amid Car Building Boom

UncategorizedJanuary 23, 20243KViews 0Likes 0Comments

In the somewhat gloomy December and annual China trade statistics released in the second week of January was buried a piece of data that hearkened back to the boom years of Chinese commodity consumption: China is buying a lot more iron ore and copper. In December, China boosted iron ore imports 11.1% year-on-year to 100.9…

Trade Data Monitor’s Top 10 Trade Trends Going Into 2024

UncategorizedDecember 20, 20234KViews 2Likes 0Comments

It’s not an easy time for global trade--the roughly $25 trillion piece of the $105 trillion world economy. Protectionism is roaring in the U.S. and Europe, causing geopolitical tension with China. Inflation across most of the world has shrunk consumers’ wallets and imports, while deflation in China is also scaring businesses. Asian supply chains are…

TDM Data Used to Scrutinize Impact of Steel and Aluminum Tariffs

UncategorizedNovember 15, 20232KViews 0Likes 0Comments

Trade scholars in a recent paper used Trade Data Monitor data on steel and aluminum trade to gauge the impact of 2018-2019 protectionist measures on U.S. and European Union imports. The paper by Simon Evenett and Fernando Martin, published by the Center for European Policy Research, found that because the U.S. and European Union…

China Boosts Imports of Raw Materials by Double Digits

UncategorizedNovember 13, 20234KViews 0Likes 0Comments

China in October dramatically increased imports of fossil fuels, industrial metals and agricultural commodities, a run on raw materials that if sustained will have a major impact on prices and supply chains. China continued to increase its ferocious energy consumption, hiking imports of natural gas 120.1% year-on-year to 8.8 million tons, coal 23.3% to 36…

Why Global Trade in Rare Earth Elements is Growing and Diversifying

UncategorizedMarch 13, 20232KViews 0Likes 0Comments

Higher prices for rare-earth minerals and strategic support from the U.S. and other governments have sparked further investment, production, and international trade, diversifying supply for minerals that are essential to high-tech production. Rare earths elements, such as dysprosium, lanthanum and cerium, are 17 elements used as niche ingredients in magnets, batteries and catalytic converters. These…

Bangladesh Textile Firms Look to Asian Markets to Recover From Covid-19 Crisis

Bangladesh Textile Firms Look to Asian Markets to Recover From Covid-19 Crisis

UncategorizedJuly 20, 20202KViews 0Likes 0Comments

The Covid-19 pandemic has cast a pall over clothing retail markets in the U.S. and Europe. With iconic firms like Brooks Brothers and JC Penney battling bankruptcy, Asian textile manufacturers have lost billions of dollars in orders. That’s hit Bangladesh’s garment sector, the world’s second largest, particularly hard. The country is heavily dependent on the…