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,…
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%.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…