Le blog du CEPII

New year, new challenges

 PostJanuary 12, 2024
By Antoine Bouët
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.

The 2023 CEPII's Programme of work: focus on shocks and deep transformations of global economy

 PostFebruary 22, 2023
By Antoine Bouët, Christophe Destais, Lionel Fontagné, Thomas Grjebine, Vincent Vicard
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.

Trade sanctions against Russia: taking stock after 100 days of war

 PostJune 15, 2022
By Cecilia Bellora, Kevin Lefebvre, Malte Thie
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.


Europe after Covid 19: How €750 billion could reboot the EU

 VideoJuly 6, 2020 - In the press
By Anne-Laure Delatte
  00:41:54
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.



Vietnam: The last dragon - 2/2: Resilience faced with international tensions

 PostFebruary 17, 2020
By Michel Fouquin, Jean-Raphaël Chaponnière
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: the last dragon - 1/2: International Openness: A Guide to Vietnam's Economic Policy

 PostFebruary 14, 2020
By Michel Fouquin, Jean-Raphaël Chaponnière
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.


CEPII Country Profiles upgrade

 PostNovember 20, 2019
By Équipe Profils du CEPII / CEPII Profiles team
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 "new silk roads": an evaluation essay
(3/4): China as a global player in globalization

 PostApril 29, 2019
By Michel Fouquin, Jean-Raphaël Chaponnière
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.


Addressing macroeconomic imbalances within the euro area: still a long road ahead

 PostApril 15, 2019
By Virginie Coudert, Cécile Couharde, Carl Grekou, Valérie Mignon
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).




Deep PTAs, Global Value Chains and Migration

 PostDecember 2, 2018
By Gianluca Orefice
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.

Why the WTO needs reform

 PostNovember 16, 2018
By Sébastien Jean
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.

Fixing the euro needs to go beyond economics

 PostOctober 29, 2018
By Anne-Laure Delatte
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.


Lifting the lid on the black box of informal trade in Africa

 PostOctober 5, 2018
By Joachim Jarreau, Cristina Mitaritonna, Sami Bensassi
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.

Banks Defy Gravity in Tax Havens

 PostSeptember 21, 2018
By Vincent Bouvatier, Gunther Capelle-Blancard, Anne-Laure Delatte
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.











Carrier International: the beginning of the unraveling of globalization?

 PostDecember 15, 2016
By Jean-Francois Boittin
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.

Why denser areas are more productive

 PostDecember 2, 2016
By Lionel Fontagné, Gianluca Santoni
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.





In search of a liquid asset for European financial markets

 PostJuly 15, 2016
By Francesco Molteni
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 price of carbon: ways forward after COP-21

 PostNovember 26, 2015
By Christian de Perthuis, Pierre-André Jouvet, Raphaël Trotignon
Because the climate is a common good, economists generally advocate the use of an international carbon price to internalize climate risk, to incorporate as many countries as possible into an agreement and to thwart “free-rider” strategies.

Towards a Sustainable Financial System

 PostNovember 26, 2015
By Armin Haas
It will be key for the global sustainability transition that the measures taken in the respective sustainability dimensions, i.e. the economic, the ecological, and the social dimension, complement and reinforce each other.



How Could We Finance Low-Carbon Investments in Europe?

 PostOctober 22, 2015
By Michel Aglietta, Etienne Espagne, Vincent Aussilloux, Baptiste Perrissin-Fabert
This year, Europe is confronted with a critical double challenge: addressing the climate change issue and pulling itself out of a persistent low growth trap. Today these two challenges are addressed separately. We propose to make private low-carbon assets eligible for the ECB asset purchase program.



Climate Finance in the Context of Sustainable Development

 PostOctober 22, 2015
By Ottmar Edenhofer, Jan Christoph Steckel, Michael Jakob
Novel ideas how to spend climate finance in a way that reduces emissions and at the same time promotes recipients’ immediate development objectives are required. In this short commentary, we propose to regard climate finance in the broader context of sustainable development.


Why Finance Can Save the Planet

 PostOctober 15, 2015
By Jean Pisani-Ferry
Most people hate finance, viewing it as the epitome of irresponsibility and greed. But, even after causing a once-in-a-century recession and unemployment for millions, finance looks indispensable for preventing an even worse catastrophe: climate change.

The “$100 000 000 000 per year” question

 PostOctober 8, 2015
By Christian De Perthuis, Pierre-André Jouvet
A mechanism of carbon “bonus-malus” is proposed, where the average emission rate of world countries serves as the anchor: above the threshold, countries should pay a malus, under this level, they would receive a bonus.





An Investment Climate for Climate Investment

 PostSeptember 22, 2015
By Sam Fankhauser
Three factors hold back low-carbon investment in Europe: the risk/return profile of low-carbon investment projects, regulatory and behavioural features in the financial sector and a more global political economy context. These are key issues to create an investment climate for climate investment.






Guideposts for low-carbon finance

 PostSeptember 18, 2015
By Billy Pizer
Four guide-posts for efficient low-carbon finance are proposed: remove subsidies for high-carbon technologies, improve the cost-effectiveness of low-carbon subsidies, encourage private sector innovation, and maintain transparent public policy tools that support cost-benefit accounting.


How to Finance the Low Carbon Transition: The Role of the Financial System

 PostSeptember 17, 2015
By Etienne Espagne, Baptiste Perrissin Fabert
The aim of this webpage, co-hosted by France Stratégie and CEPII, is to provide a medium for experts and non-experts to discuss the merits and the limits of the various proposals and initiatives in the field of international finance. It is intended to become a forum where the debate on the financial system’s contribution to the energy transition can flourish.




What could be Japan contribution to COP 21?

 PostMay 28, 2015
By Evelyne Dourille-Feer
Europe was disappointed in the GHG emissions reduction proposal by Japan in the context of the COP 21: -25.4% between 2005 and 2030. Japan could nonetheless help move forward the climate issue by its technologies and original experiences.


Volatility and uncertainty are not the same!

 PostMay 4, 2015
By Valérie Mignon, Marc Joëts, Tovonony Razafindrabe
Crude oil price volatility is often viewed as reflecting uncertainty not only related to the oil market, but also to the global macroeconomic environment. However, the question arises as to whether uncertainty is not likely to be at play without generating high volatility on the oil market.

Back to the Great Moderation?

 PostApril 30, 2015
By Stéphane Lhuissier
Following the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, modern industrial countries appear to be coming back to a moderate growth trajectory, as was the case for the last three decades.


Europe is trapped by its competitiveness obsession

 PostApril 22, 2015
By Sébastien Jean
While European external surpluses are accumulating and domestic demand is slacking, insisting on improving the Union’s external competitiveness, as some in the Commission are presently doing, is paradoxical. For Europe, the paramount risk is not losing its competitiveness. It is not recovering cohesion and growth.

QE - "European style": be bolder, but parsimonious!

 PostMarch 24, 2015
By Urszula Szczerbowicz, Natacha Valla
The ECB will purchase a monthly €60bn of private and public debt instruments between March 2015 and September 2016 – a total worth over €1 trillion. While the timing and size of purchases are known, there is more leeway than it seems in the way purchases are allocated to each category of assets.

Quantitative Easing: were markets surprised?

 PostJanuary 24, 2015
By Stéphane Lhuissier
The ECB has announced that it will launch in March its first round of quantitative easing. The announcement contains some good and bad surprises: the size of the ECB's plan is gigantic, while the Central Bank was unclear about the Greek issue. How was this announcement perceived by markets?

ECB equity purchases: too risky, really?

 PostJanuary 9, 2015
By Urszula Szczerbowicz, Natacha Valla
Instead of buying sovereign debt, the ECB could broaden further its purchases to include equity of all sorts. Fuelling an equity bubble is no worse than fuelling a bond one. It can be mitigated by intervening secretly and including non listed securities. Inhibitions to take risk should be lifted.


Long live the Juncker Plan!

 PostDecember 21, 2014
By Natacha Valla
The long awaited Juncker Plan for investment in Europe has arrived a few weeks ago. Beyond the creation of a Strategic Fund, the Plan as a whole has disappointed: not adamant enough to eliminate the deep obstacles to cross-border investment, and opaque in generating the “List” of projects to be financed. Yet, even imperfectly, Europe has now done its homework.




The delusion of State guarantees

 PostOctober 3, 2014
By Natacha Valla
European policymakers are currently busy addressing two issues: moribund investment and banks on extended sick leave. Some observers might be tempted to segregate these issues. While investment would be in the remit of States, the financial health of our economies would be under the responsibility of the ECB alone.




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