This paper reviews the steps that China has taken towards financial reform with a particular focus on capital account liberalisation and internationalisation of the use of the renminbi. After a slowdown in reform momentum during the global financial crisis, there is a clear push towards reform,...

We analyze empirically whether trade and financial linkages between two countries increase the synchronization of their business cycles directly or indirectly. In a system of equations, we use a newly processed database on the bilateral linkages of a small open economy, namely Spain. We prefer...

Along with the steady pace of RMB internationalization, this paper proposes Taiwan as a potential candidate to become the next RMB offshore center. We review the main drivers behind Hong Kong's success and set the reasons why Taiwan could follow such steps. First, Taiwan's economic ties with...

Drawing on global media reports, we conduct a sentiment analysis of the image of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the evolution of its image over time. Our main finding is that perceptions of the initiative deteriorated significantly in many geographies from 2017 to 2022. The notable...

GVCs – which have been key to the process of rapid economic globalisation of the last few decades – are being reshuffled. The role of China has changed drastically to become much more central and oriented towards adding more Chinese value to other countries’ re-exports (i.e. forward...

What was thought of as an unstoppable trend – globalisation – has recently halted, and worse still, it seems to have started reversing. A centrality of this process has been the development of global value chains (GVCs), pushed by transnational corporations as a way to reduce their costs of...

The global pandemic, which became known to the world in late January 2020, has been a defining feature not only of this decade but probably of this century. In fact, not only has the pandemic taken 6.5 million lives so far globally but it has also brought havoc to many economies. The impact of...

The renminbi (RMB) has become something of a buzzword that is mentioned in all discussions, despite the fact that the currency is not convertible. In fact, there are good reasons for its notoriety. First of all, it is the currency of an economy that within only a few years has become the biggest...