This year, the major topics of the CEPII's work programme emerge from the current gloomy context: the energy transition, the resilience of value chains, impacts of geopolitical tensions, the macroeconomic situation marked by new budgetary priorities and the tightening of monetary policies.

The day that France's parliament voted a so-called GAFA tax of three percent on revenue earned on French soil for big tech companies that hang their fiscal hat abroad, the Trump administration is paving the way for retaliatory tariffs.

The shock caused by the 2007-08 financial collapse, followed by the European sovereign debt crisis, has raised new doubts about the ability of the single currency to work well in a region with huge economic and political diversity. It has also given a new dimension to this debate by highlighting the building-up of unsustainable macroeconomic imbalances within the European Monetary Union (EMU).

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.

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.

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.

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”?

The recent G20 Hangzhou Summit is yet another example of the difficulties the G20 has to move ahead at cruising speed. Changes in the G20 process might help to increase its impact.

European financial markets face a shortage of liquid assets. New regulations increase banks’ demand for liquid securities, mainly sovereign bonds, but the European fiscal rules constrain the supply of public debt. Further, the QE is draining bonds from the market. Some proposed forms of “Eurobonds” or new debt securities issued by European supranational organizations could solve this problem.

The idea that exchange rate volatility could be detrimental to international trade is widely accepted. Surprisingly, macroeconomic evidence on its impact on trade yields either small or insignificant effect on aggregate outcomes. This column suggests that the behavior of big, multi-destination firms help explain this puzzle.