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…
During a summer that’s been a boon for free trade despite a looming escalation in trade wars, and the possibility of a second Trump administration, China’s agricultural imports dropped 4.9% year-on-year in July to $17.8 billion.
The trend reflects China’s regulatory practices, strategic protectionism, and shifting demographics. China has blocked some U.S. beef imports because of…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
As expected, China reported lackluster trade numbers this week, signaling a possible recession in the U.S. and more trouble for the global economy.
Chinese exports fell for the first time in three months, dropping 7.5% year-on-year to $283.5 billion. Imports dropped 4.5% to $217.7 billion.
The World Bank this week said that the global economy…