During the Global Crisis, international trade decreased more than overall economic activity, despite standard trade models predicting a one-to-one relationship. This ‘Great Trade Collapse’ has been investigated extensively in the literature, resulting in alternative competing explanations. This column evaluates the contribution of each story using data from the US. The results show that retail inventories have contributed the most to the collapse and the corresponding recovery, followed by protectionist policies, intermediate-input trade, and trade finance. Productivity and demand shocks have played negligible roles.
Guillermo Calvo, 20 June 2008
Here, one of the world’s leading macroeconomists argues that the explosion of commodity prices is the result of a very real global financial storm associated with excess liquidity in several non-G7 countries and nourished by the low interest rates set by G7 central banks. The commodity price explosion is a harbinger of future inflation.
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