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…
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…
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…