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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.