Category: International trade

Monitoring trade prices in the wake of trade tensions

Marco Garofalo and Thomas Prayer

The US administration raised US import tariffs in April, reigniting trade tensions. This sparked concerns about cheaper exports being diverted to other markets, potentially lowering global prices. Using detailed product-level data, we build a novel timely indicator to consistently track trade prices across countries. Chinese export prices have risen less than global ones since April and remain below March levels. Prices of other Asian exporters, Canada and Mexico have also grown more slowly than global prices, but to a more limited extent, while export prices for Europe grew faster than global patterns. UK import prices mirror those in Europe, whereas US import prices (excluding tariffs) have declined since March 2025. Our results and future updates are publicly available online.

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Supply chain disruptions: shocks, links, and hidden exposure

Rebecca Freeman, Richard Baldwin and Angelos Theodorakopoulos

Supply chain disruptions are routinely blamed for things ranging from elevated inflation to shortages of medical equipment in the pandemic. But how should exposure to foreign supply chains be measured? Using a global input-output database, this post shows that the full exposure of US manufacturing to foreign suppliers (especially China) is much larger than face value measures indicate. Moreover, it argues that the big change in supply chain disruptions in recent years stems from changes in the nature of the shocks (from idiosyncratic to systemic), not the nature of the supply chains.

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