Are you teaching international economics next spring? Or just want to learn more about the field? Consider adopting/purchasing this new textbook, by myself and Douglas Irwin (available around December 2024, from Cambridge University Press).
Category Archives: international
The Net Petroleum Balance
In real dollars:
Choi, Dang, Kirpalani, Perez on “Exorbitant privilege and the sustainability of US public debt”
From the paper abstract:
The Ito-McCauley Database on Individual Central Bank Reserve Holdings
Hiro Ito and Robert McCauley have compiled a dataset(first discussed in this 2019 working paper) of the currency composition of international reserves over the 1999-2021 period. This dataset was used in Ito and McCauley (2020), Chinn, Ito and McCauley (2022), and Chinn, Ito and Frankel (2024).
Brad Setser on China’s True Trade Balance
Brad Setser has been diligently cross-checking the external accounts of China. For purposes of thinking about how policymakers are trying to snatch aggregate demand across borders, the trade balance is key.
“Yellen Rebuffs Trump Argument on Dollar Hurting US Manufacturing”
That’s a title of an article by Christopher Condon, in Bloomberg a few days ago. What’s the evidence? Figure 1 shows the typically referenced CPI deflated trade weighted dollar.
VoxEU: “The Russian sanctions and dollar foreign exchange reserves”
From a VoxEU article today, by Robert N. McCauley with Hiro Ito and Menzie Chinn:
Will the freezing of the Bank of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves undermine the dollar’s predominant role in official foreign exchange reserves? This column examines the aggregate evidence since end-2021 for any reduction in the dollar share of official foreign exchange reserves against a baseline constructed with data from 1999 through 2021. The observed dollar share in March 2024 differs little from the out-of-sample projection based on this baseline. On this showing, official reserve managers have not reduced the role of the dollar since the freeze of the Bank of Russia’s assets.
Russia Real GDP and GDP ex-Military Spending
Using the April 2024 WEO projections (the July update indicates no revision for 2024 growth, and -0.3 ppts for 2025 y/y), we can see the following trajectory for Russian output, and Russia output ex-military spending.
Russia Economic Sit-Rep: Recession in the Coming Year?
Gorodnichenko, in YahooFinance:
July 2024 WEO Update Released
As of today: