Go to Main Content Go to Bottom

Search

Found documents: 16
Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

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, ...

Gianmarco Ottaviano

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 ...

Gianmarco Ottaviano

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 ...

Gianmarco Ottaviano

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 ...

Marco Valigi

Geopolitics: an asset for small and medium-sized enterprises

Arguing that geopolitical analysis represents an asset for small and medium-sized enterprises is a counterintuitive assertion. As an initial reaction, it is natural to experience a degree of skepticism. Geopolitics, given its analytical framework, might appear to be a method better suited to complex and articulated organizations, with budgets capable of absorbing without difficulty a function ...

Donato Masciandaro

Geoeconomics: new challenges for the ECB and the Fed

Geoeconomics is an increasingly common perspective in analyses of today’s international economic and political landscape. The recent development of geoeconomics stems from the interplay between economic analysis and political science, shining a light on the international political drivers that help explain economic policy decisions. In truth, this has long been a subject of interest for economic ...

Gianmarco Ottaviano

Geoeconomics and protectionism: the harsh law of the hammer

The trajectory of globalization shows that international trade does not follow a linear or irreversible path, but reflects a fragile balance among economic interests, political power, and conflicting ideological visions. After decades of market liberalization and faith in the multilateral institutions born after World War II, today’s global economic order is undergoing profound transformation. The ...

Gianmarco Ottaviano

From the “horizontal frontier” to the “vertical frontier”: american geoeconomics goes into orbit

In the European public debate, when space is discussed, the tone often still oscillates between the epic of conquest and the rhetoric of scientific cooperation. In the United States, by contrast, space has become something far more prosaic and, at the same time, far more strategic: a natural extension of industrial policy and national economic security. At the beginning of 2026, the question of whether ...

Donato Masciandaro

Trump and the Monroe Doctrine 2.0: between political dominance and monetary instability

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe doctrine.” These were Donald Trump’s words, spoken just hours after the Maduro operation in Venezuela. Leaving aside yet another demonstration that modesty is hardly the defining virtue of the current occupant of the White House, what does this mean? In December 1823, President Monroe, ...

Magazine article (E&M - 2019/4) Magri Papolo, Belladonna Alberto

On the Global Chessboard, the Game is On

For over a decade now, the hub of global production has shifted to the East. The macro-region of India, China, and Southeast Asia now generates 34 percent of global GDP and participates in over 20 percent of global trade, most of which takes place through maritime connections. This growth is also favored by the attention to infrastructure: Asia is in fact the region that invests the most in infrastructure, ...