The Biden Administration has said it is not interested in negotiating new trade agreements until the U.S. makes investments in things like infrastructure to better enable Americans to compete. However, the data does not support such conditionality. China makes an outsized investment in infrastructure at over 5.5 percent of GDP but has a trade surplus that is only about half the size of Germany’s despite the latter investing just one-eighth as much GDP into infrastructure. Italy invests a smaller share of GDP into infrastructure than the U.S., and yet runs a trade surplus versus America with the largest trade deficit in the world. Looking at the countries with some of the largest trade surpluses and trade deficits, the correlation to...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.