World trade stands firm for now

While Trump’s trade policy threatens to derail its current sustained recovery, trade made a strong start to 2018 with 0.9% growth in January, today’s data release shows

The World Trade Monitor published by CPB shows that imports were 0.9% higher in January than in the last month of last year. Imports demand rose across emerging economies and several advanced economies (exceptions were the US and Japan), showing that the favourable phase in world economic growth has continued to provide support for trade in early 2018.

Policy changes have however, markedly increased the downward risk to our outlook for trade. We expect that if US import tariffs on Chinese goods are implemented, alongside the steel and aluminium tariffs which came into effect for a range of countries last night, the 3.7% expected growth in world trade in 2018 will be approximately 0.3% points lower.