10 articles

Trade

Country audits, trade lanes and the flows behind the headlines.

One Tonne of Chips Now Buys 8,600 Tonnes of Crude Oil

Export value is decoupling from export weight, and the densest goods on the ledger increasingly ship from East Asia, not the West.

3 Nov 20268 min read

Trade

The World's Most Traded Good Is Still Oil — Until 2027

The world's most-cited trade ranking is now an accounting choice. The same publisher's two 2024 crude totals are $210bn apart — and one of them is physically impossible.

18 Oct 20265 min read

Trade

Trade Audit — France

France's trade deficit collapsed from a record €161.7 billion in 2022 to €69.2 billion in 2025 — a 57% improvement.

4 Oct 20269 min read

Trade

Trade Audit — Brazil

Brazil runs one of the world's largest commodity trade surpluses — but it is shrinking, not setting records.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Trade

Trade Audit — Australia

Australia built the fastest export growth of any advanced commodity economy since 1990 on a single, narrow bet: Chinese demand for its raw materials.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Trade

World Trade Hit $34.9 Trillion in 2025. Someone Forgot to Tell the Peak-Globalization Theorists.

Goods and services trade reached a record $34.89 trillion in 2025, up 8%, and the WTO now expects trade volumes to outgrow GDP through 2027. The obituaries mistook a flat trade-to-GDP ratio for a stagnant system. The system moved: to services, and to Asia's corridors.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Trade

Halving China's $1.2 Trillion Trade Surplus Would Cost $100 to $150 Billion a Year

The most repeated policy prescription for China's record trade surplus — "boost domestic consumption" — fails on composition: what China exports is not what Chinese households buy. But a combined package of import liberalization, targeted subsidies, and capacity reduction could halve the surplus at an annual fiscal cost of $100 to $150 billion, or 0.5 to 0.8% of GDP. The range is wide because it depends on one number: how much subsidy translates into new demand for what China currently exports.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Trade

Trade Audit — Korea

South Korea exported $709.7 billion of goods in 2025 — a record, and the first time above $700 billion — driven by a semiconductor super-cycle.

4 Oct 20266 min read

Trade

Trade Audit — Mexico

Nearshoring pushed Mexico to a record $663.7 billion of goods exports in 2025 and made it the United States' largest trade partner — but Mexico retains a far smaller share of each export dollar than its peers. On the OECD's cross-country measure, Mexico kept 65 cents of every export dollar in 2020, the last year measured, versus 92.5 cents for the US. Mexico's own statistics office puts the figure higher (77%) and rising — but no post-2020 data yet exists to judge whether the nearshoring boom has moved it.

4 Oct 20264 min read

Trade

Trade Audit — Vietnam

Vietnam's exports grew from $2.4 billion in 1990 to $475 billion in 2025 — a 198-fold increase, among the fastest of any economy on record. But the domestic value-added share of those exports fell from 76.9% in 1995 to 52.0% in 2020 (the last year the OECD series measures it) — by far the steepest decline in the value-added data we track. Vietnam built one of the world's most explosive export machines. The question is how much of it Vietnam actually owns.

4 Oct 20264 min read

This week at The Quant, ⁦2026-W44⁩

One account. Every number that mattered.

Create a free account to bookmark pieces, join the discussion and pick up where you left off. Subscribers also get the weekly edition by email.

Continue with Google

No password. We email you a six-digit code.