Le solde commercial de la France, qui a atteint son plus bas niveau historique en 2022, s’améliore légèrement en 2023 grâce à la baisse des prix de l’énergie. Cette tendance est soutenue par des exportations dynamiques dans les secteurs de spécialisation de la France ainsi que des services. Le déficit reste important, bien supérieur à celui affiché par nos voisins européens. À l'échelle de l'UE, la baisse des prix de l'énergie conduit au rétablissement d'un excédent commercial.

The CEPII is looking forward to the new year and the developments it will bring that we hope to be positive. The Government, under whose auspices the CEPII has been operating since 1978, has initiated a thorough review of how to enhance the performance and coordination of the French organisations that conduct economic analysis and policy evaluation.

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.

On 23rd February - the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Council of the European Union (EU) adopted the first package of sanctions in response to Moscow's recognition of the self-proclaimed autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Since then, five further packages have followed, the last of which was adopted on 3rd June. From the second package onwards, sanctions affected trade in goods.

The Ukrainian conflict has brought to the forefront the issue of Europe's dependence on hydrocarbon imports. Trade data are the usual source to construct a measure of interdependence between states. In the case of natural gas, however, they do not provide a reliable picture of actual flows.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel might well hold the future of Europe in their hands. Or maybe more accurately in their cheque books. Round table with Anne-Laure Delatte, Lorenzo Marsili, Daniel Stelter, and Olaf Wientzek, on France 24 on 30 june 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of the Old continent to drug-supply disruption. Europe nevertheless remains, by far, the leader in the global trade of pharmaceutical products. Article published in The Conversation on May 31, 2020

The economic costs of the Covid-19 crisis will crucially depend on the evolution of financial and economic uncertainty. This blog presents a dashboard to track uncertainty in the US economy and compare the ongoing crisis to the 1987 and 2008 financial crises.
Updated from March 26 post.

Vietnam opening up and development are closely linked to the strategies of multinational companies at the heart of the transformation of economic structures. In spite of international trade tensions, Vietnam seems to be taking advantage of this by acting as a conduit for Japanese, Korean and Chinese companies to export to the United States.

Vietnam has opted for international openness since 1986 to create a “socialist market economy”, which has allowed it to experience vigorous economic expansion. Its integration into the world economy has made it an important link in international value chains, massively importing components from China and Asia in general, and exporting, as massively, finished products to the United States and Europe.

More than three years after the Brexit referendum, Brexit is still not settled, but the uncertainty remains. This long period of uncertainty has cost around half a point of economic growth per year since 2016 for the UK’s economy, which is equivalent to an annual loss of £16 billion.

CEPII offers an enhanced version of the Country Profiles ─the online interactive pages elaborated from its own databases─ which present the insertion of 80 economies in world trade. These free of use data are provided in the form of didactic illustrations for informational, educational and research purposes.

The US trade policy is severely destabilising the international trade system. The European Union is fighting to maintain the latter's stability, which is under dire threat. This text has been first published for the Schuman Foundation.

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.

Europe’s competition policy has successfully contained the rise in concentration and excess profits, and the EU should not follow the US in weakening its approach. Instead, the EU needs to strengthen its trade policy to be more assertive on reciprocity in market access and control of industrial subsidies.

China's international expansion follows multiple paths: trade, investment, finance and currency, to focus on the economy. In doing so, it pursues different objectives. The new roads project appears to be the way to provide a flexible framework for China's overall strategy. However, we can question its feasibility.

A review of China's international activity since 2013 is striking first of all by the speed with which it has made China a major player in globalization in terms of both direct investment and lending to developing countries. The Silk Roads project, which is a unique and unconventional project, appears above all as a means of gradually structuring the Chinese vision of globalization, which combines China's long-term economic and strategic interest.

Since 2018, the US administration has implemented several measures limiting free trade with China and other countries. Using cross-country data and a general equilibrium model, this column argues that a trade war hurts not only the targeted countries but also the country imposing the tariffs.
Column first published in VOX.

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).

Initially Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) focussed on transport infrastructure and pipelines on the one hand and Europe-Asia connectivity on the other hand. It aims at building an Eurasian Belt as well as several corridors leading to maritime roads.