John Miller, Author at Trade Data Monitor

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John Miller

138 articles published

Vietnam’s Superpower: Versatility

UncategorizedMarch 27, 2026169Views 0Likes 0Comments

Vietnam’s Moment in (Trade) Time The wars in Iran and Ukraine, and trade turmoil around the world, especially involving the U.S. and China, have obscured what continues to be one of the essential trade stories of the century: Vietnam’s export growth. The Asian country of 102 million has staged an epic comeback since the 1970s…

How AI Is Driving Global Trade

UncategorizedMarch 16, 2026250Views 0Likes 0Comments

Lower Growth in China In early March, Chinese leadership set their lowest gross domestic product growth target since 1991, forecasting a 4.5% to 5% expansion for its economy in 2026. This week, China reported a 21.8% year-on-year increase in exports for January and February to $656.6 billion. To avoid distorted numbers because of Chinese New…

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, 2026599Views 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…

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.…

Global Coal Trade is Finally Faltering

UncategorizedAugust 25, 20251KViews 0Likes 0Comments

China Cuts Coal Imports For years, as governments around the world embraced clean energy technology, coal trade held steady because China was still buying. As the rest of the world turned away from coal, China boosted imports to power its booming electrification, and a vibrant new industry of electric vehicles and batteries. In 2024, it…

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…

China Reconfigures Export Markets as Shipments to U.S. Plummet

UncategorizedJune 19, 20251KViews 1Like 0Comments

U.S. Market Collapsing For China As Americans and Chinese officials scrambled to forge new politically acceptable trade terms, China reported a pandemic-level decline in exports to the U.S. Chinese shipments to the U.S. fell 34.4% year-on-year in May to $28.8 billion, the steepest drop since Covid-19 upended global trade in February 2020. Chinese imports from…

China Hikes Oil & Gas Imports

UncategorizedApril 23, 20251KViews 1Like 0Comments

China’s Economy When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the move was seen as an essential turboboost to a huge but developing country. Without access to global markets, there was no way for China to become the greatest exporter the world has ever seen. Now, as the backlash to that growth turns into…

Steel Trade Trends in 2025

UncategorizedNovember 15, 20243KViews 0Likes 0Comments

Shake-up in Global Steel The world of steel trade is in for a shake-up. New climate rules in Europe, the prospect of ramped-up U.S. tariffs on steel and an excess of Chinese steel imports mean companies around the world must calibrate their trade strategies in 2024. With the U.S. locked in protectionism and the…

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…

How Chinese Exports Beat Tariffs

UncategorizedJune 11, 20242KViews 2Likes 0Comments

More Tariffs on the Horizon There seems to be no end to the trade pendulum swinging hard toward protectionism in Brussels and Washington-- or to Chinese exports continuing to flood global markets. The Biden administration last month slapped tariffs on imports of electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and other high-tech goods from China. (They’ll mostly affect batteries.) The…

Middle East Trade in the Time of War

UncategorizedJune 5, 20243KViews 0Likes 0Comments

Middle East: The Big Picture In 2024, the Middle East has been hit by conflict, piracy, and the vagaries of supply chains and the oil market. The specter of protectionism appears threatening, especially between countries in conflict with each other. As the U.S. and the European Union slide into a quasi-permanent protectionist mindset, including tit-for-tat…

China’s EV Export Boom is Driving up Demand for RoRo Ships

UncategorizedApril 15, 20242KViews 0Likes 0Comments

China’s electric car export boom has fueled demand in the country for automobile transport ships, driving up prices for foreign buyers. Overall, in March, Chinese ship exports fell 5.9% year-on-year by quantity in March to 399, after steadily rising for most of this decade. By value, they increased 34% to $3.1 billion. So called Roll-on/roll-off,…

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…

China Doubles Coal and Gas Imports as Global Trade Putters

UncategorizedJuly 27, 20232KViews 0Likes 0Comments

The world’s biggest exporter reported another month of dismal trade figures for June. Chinese exports declined 13% year-on-year in the month to $285.3 billion, and imports fell 6.9% to $214.7 billion. The decline was driven by a massive drop in consumer spending in the U.S. and Europe, caused by inflation, fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, and…

Trade Data Show Correlations Between Gas and Urea Prices

UncategorizedFebruary 20, 20232KViews 0Likes 0Comments

Correlations between urea and natural gas pricing can exist during periods when supply and demand disruptions are not driving prices. This is logical given that the urea value chain starts with natural gas. Using statistics from Trade Data Monitor, Baltic country (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden) natural gas import prices…