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.

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.