For more than thirty years, China has recorded exceptional trade surpluses and accumulated extraordinary financial reserves, which are almost twice those of its immediate follower Japan. These surpluses are an inconvenience to its most important partners, such as the United States and the European Union.

Stocks and sovereign bonds are among the most used financial products and the correlation between stock and bond returns corresponds to a typically time-varying pattern reflecting changes in investors' decisions.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) can be used by signatory countries to manage international migration flows and participation in global value chain. The inclusion of an additional provision in PTAs stimulates the bilateral fragmentation of production by 1 percent, while PTAs that facilitate visa and asylum administrative procedures stimulate bilateral migration by up to 34 percent.

The world trading system is facing an existential crisis. This calls for a significant update of the rulebook, dealing with dissatisfactions regarding negotiation and rules, surveillance, as well as adjudication.

The agenda to fix the euro is hampered by conflicting national interests. Creditor countries demand fiscal house cleaning and debtor countries ask for risk sharing. There is currently a political deadlock about how the adjustment burden should be distributed, perpetuating a state of vulnerability that is not in the collective interest of euro area members. This column, part of the Vox debate on euro area reform, argues that overcoming this coordination failure requires reforming the political governance of the EU, rather than just its economic governance.
This post has been first published on VoxEU.

Migration, particularly skilled migration, is a driver of knowledge diffusion and it can induce productivity shifts as measured by new exports.

This post, already published on The Conversation, explains how official statistics do not reflect the reality of internal trade in Africa. Intra Africa trade seems low despite numerous regional trade agreements that have led to tariffs removal within the trading blocs. However, a large part of cross-border trade between African countries is informal.

This post, already published in Voxeu, examines the contribution of EU banks to tax evasion. It presents the new finding that bank activity in tax havens is three times larger when using new country-by-country regulatory data than what is predicted by the gravity model, and that British and German banks are particularly present in tax havens.

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, three panel discussions, CEPII brought together experts, foreign and French, decision-makers and academics to discuss the major challenges that France and Europe are facing ten years after the crisis and the deep transformation of the international economic relationships.
See videos et presentations.

Despite President Trump’s announcement to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, several States committed to uphold the US objectives of the Agreement within their borders.

On January 22, President Trump announced his decision to apply tariffs on imported washing machines and photovoltaic cells and modules, and other protectionist measures could follow. To understand what the impacts of such measures could be, we review an earlier episode, the steel safeguards imposed by George W. Bush in 2002.

Trade between Japan and the EU is not a big deal in world trade, barely more than 1%. Their Economic Partnership Agreement can nevertheless be very influential because, jointly, they are a party in more than 40% of world trade, and much more in innovative sectors.

The sharp drop in commodity prices has had a sizeable impact on Latin America's short term growth prospects. The decline in terms of trade has also revealed, once again, the low productivity of the region's economies. Investing in infrastructure could help Latin America simultaneously address these short and long term challenges.

With Brexit and the election of D. Trump, tariffs and exchange rates are back at the centre stage of policy debates. This column revisits the assumptions economists make when estimating how tariffs and exchange rates affect exporters’ performance.

Despite numerous studies exploring how immigration affects local labour markets, there is limited evidence on the impact of immigrants on firms’ productivity levels. Using detailed, firm-level data from France, this column explores how firms react to an increase in the supply of immigrant workers.

Regulation is a barrier to trade. A recent CEPII Working Paper uses French firm-level panel data to assess how technical barriers to trade impact firms’ exports.

The US President has a problem with the American geography – a problem called Mexico.

The election of Donald Trump has generated a climate of uncertainty about U.S. economic policy that will be implemented in the near future. How much should we worry about this “Trumpian uncertainty”?

Dec. 1st may well be remembered in the history books of the 22nd century as the beginning of the end of globalization. This is the day when the President-elect paraded his “victory” over the management of Carrier International, a unit of United Technologies that had announced the move of 2,000 some jobs to Mexico.

A key driver of productivity is ease of resource allocation. This column uses firm-level data for France to show that misallocation has a spatial dimension: resource allocation and the associated effect on productivity are related not only to firms’ characteristics, but also to the environment in which they operate. Denser commuting zones seem to offer a better match between employers and employees, leading to more productive firms.