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John Miller

143 articles published

China’s Hidden Trade Deficit: Microchips

UncategorizedSeptember 11, 20260Comments

Another Big Month for Chinese Exports China on Tuesday reported another phenomenal month of exports. Its total shipments rose 25% year-on-year in August to $401.4 billion. Meanwhile, total imports increased 28.2% to $282.4 billion. The gap means China is on track to report a second straight year of a trade surplus of well over a trillion…

TDM Insight: China is Becoming a ‘Factory for Factories’

UncategorizedAugust 14, 20260Comments

Another Strong Month The Artificial Intelligence revolution gets the headlines and is being credited for another robust trade month. In July, Chinese exports increased 23.9% year-on-year to $397.9 billion. Its monthly surplus was $112.5 billion, putting it on track for another trillion-dollar annual surplus. “Export and import values remain elevated, helped by soaring global demand…

China’s New Record: Over 1M Cars Exported in a Month

UncategorizedJuly 29, 20260Comments

China released eye-popping June trade numbers on Tuesday. “A bit insane,” said Brad Setser of the Council of Foreign Relations, on X. Overall, Chinese exports increased 27% year-on-year to $412.4 billion. Imports expanded even more, by 36% year-on-year, to $286.8 billion. Chinese officials attributed the spike to the new artificial intelligence economy. “With the rapid growth of…

Trade Statistics Show Inflation

UncategorizedJune 30, 20260Comments

AI is Still Driving Trade Despite an increase in protectionism and tariffs, global trade has persisted at a steady pace thanks to a boom in sales of new technologies related to artificial intelligence. The war in the Middle East and subsequent energy crisis have only made economies more focused on restructuring in an environmentally friendly…

Is The U.S.-China Trade War Over?

UncategorizedMay 13, 20260Comments

U.S.-China Summit This Week When Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, trade, for once, won’t be the primary topic. Among more severe crises in play are the U.S. war with Iran, the rise of artificial intelligence, and China’s desire to annex Taiwan. After the Trump’s imposition of triple-digit tariffs last year, Beijing…

How AI Is Driving Global Trade

UncategorizedMarch 16, 20260Comments

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, 20260Comments

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, 20260Comments

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, 20250Comments

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…

Global Coal Trade is Finally Faltering

UncategorizedAugust 25, 20250Comments

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, 20250Comments

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, 20250Comments

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…

Trump Election Gooses Trade– Before Tariffs Hit

UncategorizedNovember 7, 20240Comments

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, 20240Comments

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, 20240Comments

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 Tariffs Are Reshuffling EV Trade

UncategorizedJuly 11, 20240Comments

Age of the EV We’re entering the age of the electric vehicle, and global trade is keeping pace. Around 20% of all cars bought in the world in 2023, a total of almost 14 million, were electric, and there are now 40 million on the road, according to the International Energy Agency. Total trade in…

TDM Insight: Vietnamese Exports Rebound in 2024

UncategorizedMay 15, 20240Comments

After a tepid recovery in 2023, Vietnam’s trade machine appears to be firing on all cylinders so far in 2024. The country boosted exports 16.8% year-on-year to $92.9 billion in the first quarter, underpinning gross domestic product growth of 5.7%. This is no coincidence. Vietnam’s export sector is key to its economic growth. It is…

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

UncategorizedApril 15, 20240Comments

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,…

China Reboots Trade Thanks to Africa, India, Latin America

UncategorizedMarch 11, 20240Comments

Don’t let anybody tell you that globalization is dying—at least, not yet. Global trade economists obsess over consumer demand and rising protectionism in the U.S. and Europe, but this week’s release of Chinese trade statistics shows that other markets might soon be catching up in relevance. The Promise of Other Markets China’s exports to Latin…

Vietnam’s Secret Weapon: Agriculture

UncategorizedMarch 1, 20240Comments

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, 20240Comments

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, 20240Comments

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…

Turkey Hikes Exports of Military-Goods Exported to Russia

UncategorizedDecember 8, 20230Comments

A recent Financial Times article, based on data supplied by Trade Data Monitor, detailed the increase in Turkish exports of military-linked goods to Russia in the first nine months of 2023. This has magnified U.S. concerns over the trade of 45 "high-profile" items subject to export controls and heightened tensions with NATO partners. The FT…

TDM Data Used to Scrutinize Impact of Steel and Aluminum Tariffs

UncategorizedNovember 15, 20230Comments

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…