MSI

Mainstream media can be forgiven for misunderstanding the reasons of the European monetary union’s sluggish economic growth. But it is quite a different problem when European leaders call for grandiose policy programs while ignoring structural problems that are undermining their epochal project of...

With a rapidly increasing population of 700 million, the economic growth of the trading bloc of eleven Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) continues to advance at an annual rate of 5 percent. The group’s flexible organizational structure helps to maintain economic, political and social cohesion – wi...

Geopolitics have always been the main factor influencing volumes and directions of world trade. Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 was such a geopolitical event that reinforced existing Asian security faultlines. Ostensibly, that move was meant to increase American political and mi...

The European project of economic and political unification started out with the Treaty of Rome in March 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom). There were six founding member countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxem...

External sector of the Chinese economy -- the sum of exports and imports of its goods and services -- amounts to about 40 percent of the country’s GDP. By that measure, China is an important part of the world trading system, and a country whose economic growth very much depends on its overseas bus...

With an increase of 2.1 percent during the first nine months of this year, the U.S. economy is moving along at a pace largely consistent with its physical limits to growth in an environment of somewhat elevated inflation pressures. Over that period, the economy was driven by a 2.8 percent growth of ...

Put simply, a country running a trade deficit shows that it consumes more goods and services than is supplied by its productive capacities. Conversely, a country with a trade surplus produces more goods and services than is consumed in its domestic markets. The next step is to see what that does to ...

America’s soaring public debt and widening trade deficits have finally forced Washington to review unsustainable economic and security policies with its European allies. Trade with Europe has been a contentious issue ever since the early post-WWII years, when the new international monetary system ...

These three countries seem set to tighten up and upgrade the Eurasian and Indo-Pacific wings of a recently enlarged BRICS membership. But to do that, they have to start by broadening the scope of their own relations. India and China have a lot of difficult work to do in that area. The two countries ...

The first estimate of Japan’s third quarter GDP growth shows that trade surpluses are no longer one of the key drivers of economic activity. All the 1.6% growth in the first nine months of this year has been generated by domestic demand – private consumption, investments and government spending....