Management Tips
What’s in the New Silk Road
Italy was the first G7 country to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with China. The framework is that of the so-called New Silk Road, the colossal investment plan launched in 2013 by the President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, with the idea of exploiting the trade routes of antiquity to move goods from one side of the Eurasian continent to the other, by sea and by land. In essence, ...
Western Sanctions and Russia's Resilience: A Dead End?
According to the Russian Statistical Office, 2023 saw the gross domestic product grow by 3.6%, outpacing the average global economic growth. While data from Moscow should be evaluated cautiously, even the IMF revised its estimate to 3%, suggesting that Russia's economy has indeed grown faster than the global average. The oil and gas industry has been at the forefront of supporting Moscow's economic ...
Marine and Submarine Routes: the Red Sea and the Future of Global Trade
We tend to think of the global market as a seamless large bazaar where goods from all over the world flow with ease. In reality, it consists of countless bazaars of all sizes, connected by a circular flow of goods. The most important connections are maritime, and they are quite few. For this reason, the attacks on ships off the coast of Yemen raise concerns that may seem exaggerated, considering that ...
The Oval Office Desk and the Paradoxes of Trump’s Protectionism
In a remake of a film already seen in 2018, President Donald Trump has resumed imposing or threatening to impose tariffs on imports from the United States’ main trading partners. Now, as then, the rationale behind this escalation is twofold. On the one hand, an administration led by a “deal-maker” believes that all trade agreements signed by previous administrations (including his own, as in ...