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

UncategorizedAugust 14, 2026205Views 0Likes 0Comments

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, 2026337Views 0Likes 0Comments

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…

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

UncategorizedJanuary 20, 2026878Views 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, 20261KViews 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, 20251KViews 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…

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

UncategorizedJune 19, 20252KViews 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…

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%.…

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 Tariffs Are Reshuffling EV Trade

UncategorizedJuly 11, 20243KViews 1Like 0Comments

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, 20243KViews 0Likes 0Comments

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…

Can Chinese Imports Boost the Global Economy?

UncategorizedMay 14, 20242KViews 0Likes 0Comments

The Beijing trade engine has been slumping this year amid a tepid global economy, so a surprising jump in Chinese imports in April has raised the prospect of a China-led recovery. Total Chinese imports rose 8.4% year-on-year in April to $220.1 billon, almost double analyst expectations. Total exports increased 1.5% to $292.5 billon. Surprising Global…

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

UncategorizedApril 15, 20243KViews 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,…

China Reboots Trade Thanks to Africa, India, Latin America

UncategorizedMarch 11, 20243KViews 0Likes 0Comments

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, 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, 20243KViews 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, 20235KViews 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…

Turkey Hikes Exports of Military-Goods Exported to Russia

UncategorizedDecember 8, 20233KViews 0Likes 0Comments

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, 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…

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…