This paper analyzes the U.S. trade policy in the age of great power competition at both international and intranational levels and put it in theoretical and historical perspective. While from international point of view, the U.S.-China decoupling is caused by the geopolitical confrontation between great powers, from domestic point of view, the U.S.-China trade war is triggered by the backlash of the American middle class against a flood of imports from China. These two factors constrain the course of the U.S. trade policy and the progress of the U.S.-China decoupling.

The Chinese economy reached the end of its rapid growth at the late 2000s, and a shift in “growth mode” from investment- and foreign-demand-led growth to consumption- and domestic-demand-led growth is underway. China’s already transforming external economic behavior, including economic growth driven by domestic demand and innovation, regional expansion into Asia and Eurasia, and active involvement in global governance, has been further accelerated and amplified under the U.S.-China competition since the end of the 2010s.

This article analyzes the trade relationship between the U.S. and China from the viewpoint of Global Value Chains (GVCs). We find that the international division of labor formed in the Asia-Pacific region plays a significant role in the growth of Chinese exports to the U.S., and particularly in the ICT sector, which accounts for most of the U.S. deficit in goods trade with China, foreign-invested enterprises in China have been the main players in increasing exports to the U.S. We also observe that the development of the international division of labor with China as the export base has impacted China’s value-added trade.

The confrontation between the United States and China over “data” is becoming increasingly fierce. While the U.S. is pursuing “free flow of data,” China is regulating cross-border data transfers and imposing strict data localization requirements on companies and individuals within its borders. This paper examines the reasons for this conflict, how “data” has become so important that it has become a source of friction between the two countries, and the nature of the two countries’ approaches to this issue.

This paper addresses the ECB’s policy normalization elasticity of the unconventional monetary policies (UMPs). We modify it such as Thomas Piketty did. We show that the ECB should launch policy normalization during the sustained low natural interest rate due to its low elasticity at a minimum of around 0.5. Methodologically, we assume the New Keynesian model based on Suzuki (2021) and simulate the natural interest rate elasticity of monetary policy and variables by the basic quantum mechanics of Kalman filtering. Intuitively, we treat the natural rate as potential rate of private investment capital return as the costs of policy normalization.

This paper analyzes the trends in regional income inequality during the period 1978–2018 by using the Theil inequality index in the background of China’s trade liberalization. The results show that the regional income inequality has a trend of first falling, then rising, and then falling again in the middle of 2000s. Furthermore, by using the results of the measurement of inequality, regression analysis is conducted to examine the impact of economic opening on it and the change of the impact. Finally, from the perspective of the policy context, we conclude that these changes are linked to a shift in China’s regional development policies.