Some five years after the severe recession of 2009, private sector investment in Europe is still dangerously sluggish. And public investment has been cut further, reinforcing a long term downward trend. At a mere 2% of GDP, it has halved over thirty years.

CEPII launches its third Policy Brief: “China’s Roadmap to Harmonious Society. Third Plenum Decisions on ‘major issues concerning comprehensively deepening reforms’.”

The decline in investment rates in the euro area following the global financial crisis has been sharp. And it looks as though it will not reverse significantly. Rebooting investment and channeling investable funds to the right places on the continent is therefore a major challenge for policy makers.

For a fact, measures of headline consumer price inflation have decelerated sharply over the recent past. At 0.8-1%; inflation hovers around levels that are clearly below the ECB’s flagship 2% medium-term objective.

Strikingly, the debate about the Feb 7 ruling of the German Constitutional Court against the ECB’s flagship OMT programme has gone almost unnoticed in France. This is wrong. The French should care about it.

Currency swaps between central banks are quickly emerging as a key feature of the international monetary system.

For a long time considered as impossible to implement, the negative interest rates on deposits of commercial banks at the central bank is now often mentioned as an option for the European Central Bank (ECB).

The special and differential treatment granted to developing countries, a key principle in the multilateral trading system, now appears broken-down. Based on a speech given at the WTO Forum, this post reviews -with a focus on agriculture- why this is so and what could be done.

CEPII launches its first Policy Brief “Transatlantic Trade: Whither Partnership, Which Economic Consequences?” which examines the stakes and potential impacts of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

The current turmoil in emerging capital markets is the result of a classical reversal of market sentiment after an excess of optimism. There are good reasons for being cautiously optimistic but uncertainties remain.