The global economy is fragmenting. Tariffs are back. Energy flows are political. Chinese investment is watched like a weather system. And yet most of the debate is conducted with anecdotes and a single number: the bilateral trade deficit.
The European Union's negotiation with China is the clearest example. The outcome was none, and the reason is simple: the whole basis for the negotiation is flawed. The EU continues to perceive a large and growing trade deficit with China, which came to €304.5 billion in goods in 2024, as something that hurts Europe and favours China. That is not an accounting identity. It is an assumption. A deficit is a symptom to be investigated, not a verdict to be announced. Without data, the EU is negotiating with a mirror.
That is why I have spent recent weeks building six interactive tools on global trade, tariffs, energy, oil and gas, and Chinese investment. They are free and built on real data. One will be released every three days; the first goes live this week. The trade tool covers 25 years, from 2000 to 2025, all countries, 100 product groups, and regions from the G20 to ASEAN, the EU, Mercosur and the African Union. This is not a specialist luxury. It is the minimum equipment for anyone who wants to argue about trade seriously.
The first lesson is that trade is a network, not a set of bilateral balances. Look at the 2024 G20 flows and ask which country sits at the centre. Most people guess wrong, because they think in pairs: who sells to whom, who owes whom. The map shows centrality, chokepoints, and the difference between being connected and being dependent. A tariff is not a wall. It is a change in the price of a link in the network. You cannot see the effect without seeing the network.
The second lesson is that deficits are not proof of being cheated. The United States runs a trade deficit with almost every country in the world and in almost every product category, except energy, where it has been a net exporter every year since 2019, according to the US Energy Information Administration. If a bilateral deficit were proof of exploitation, the US would be the most exploited nation on earth and would have to tariff everyone on everything. The data exposes the absurdity. China, meanwhile, runs a trade deficit of USD 450 billion in energy products. The country accused of mercantilism is also a giant net importer. These are the basic facts any serious tariff policy must confront.
Tariffs have measurable effects, and data can show them. When the EU-Japan free trade agreement began cutting tariffs in February 2019, Italian exports to Japan grew 19.7% over that year. That is not an argument for or against tariffs in general. It is an argument for knowing what they do. The same applies to energy and Chinese investment. If Europe wants to discuss de-risking, it needs to know which value chains are vulnerable, which products are concentrated, and where Chinese capital actually goes. At the WTO, the discussion has moved toward global value chains, domestic value added and the industries most exposed to decoupling. That work is impossible with a headline and a hunch.
The fragmentation is real. ASEAN is pushing the use of local currencies for trade among its members and with its partners. The EU and ASEAN operate in different modes. Mercosur's exports are concentrated in a few markets. Italy's trade surplus is mostly with countries outside the EU: in 2024 it ran a surplus of €65.1 billion with non-EU markets and a deficit of €10.2 billion with its EU partners, because that is where growth is. Each of these facts is a data question before it is a political one.
The answer is not to hand trade policy to technocrats. It is to put the data in everyone's hands: free, interactive, real. Then argue. Then negotiate. Then vote. But first, look at the map.
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