VoxTalks Economics

If you run a business that exports to the United States, how big is the tariff you have to pay? In 2025 that question was hard to answer. Between February and December, 53 separate announcements introduced, delayed, reinstated or changed US tariffs, with different countries and products pulled in or exempted each time.
Kalina Manova (UCL, CEPR) and her colleagues built a database of every one of those announcements, but they also measured  the confusion that those announcements created. She tells Tim Phillips about how tariff confusion has become a second tax on trade, as confusion puts off exporters: but it's one that raises no revenue. 
On average, uncertainty about the actual tariff doubled the damage done to trade by the tariff hikes themselves. For some countries it tripled it. Does this result mean that, if the US cleared up the confusion by not changing its tariffs regularly, it could double tariff income for the same impact on trade?
The research behind this episode:
Manova, Kalina, Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson, and Aaron Tang. 2026. "Tariff Confusion." CEPR Discussion Paper DP21688 (gated).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Kalina Manova. 2026. "Tariff Confusion." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Kalina Manova is Professor of Economics at University College London and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her work spans global production networks and multinational activity, firm productivity and management, trade policy, and the financial frictions that shape international trade and investment. She holds an AB, AM and PhD from Harvard, and has previously held posts at Stanford, Princeton and Oxford.
Research cited in this episode

US Tariff Announcement Database (USTAD). The dataset Manova and her co-authors assembled by hand from US presidential executive orders and proclamations, recording all 53 tariff announcements of 2025 and tracing, for roughly 230 origin countries and more than 18,000 ten-digit product categories, the statutory tariff in place each month.
The four confusion measures. With no direct way to measure confusion, the paper proxies it four ways: the cumulative number of relevant announcements a firm had to track; the number of possible tariff calculations those announcements could produce (labelled tariff mess, defined as two to the power of the number of announcements); the highest tariff a firm might infer if it heard only the bad news (tariff max); and how far that worst case sits above the true statutory rate (tariff miss).
The firm survey. A survey of roughly 4,500 firms in the US and Canada in March and April 2025 found that around 45% believed tariffs on Chinese goods were below 20%, when the true average was about 42%; at the same time, 87% underestimated how many announcements had postponed or rolled back tariffs. Firms were wrong in both directions at once.
Trade policy uncertainty. A prior literature on uncertainty about future tariffs, which tends to find that firms delay forming trade relationships when the future is unclear. The paper’s contribution is to separate confusion about current tariffs from uncertainty about future ones, and to show the former bites on its own.
Relationship-specific investment and trust. Trade in goods that require buyers and suppliers to customise to one another, or that sit in stickier supply relationships, proved more resilient to confusion; so did trade with countries whose populations report higher trust in foreigners. Informal trust, rather than formal contract enforcement, did the work of cushioning the shock.
The IEEPA ruling. In February 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs imposed in 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unlawful. The paper's data stops before the ruling, which generated fresh policy change and, presumably, fresh confusion.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

World War Trade. Richard Baldwin on how the April 2025 tariffs settled into a trade Cold War, and why the rest of the world kept trading without the US.
Europe in the Middle. Pol Antràs and Beata Javorcik on where redirected Chinese exports go when they can no longer sell in the US, and what that means for European firms and consumers.
How exchange rates responded to tariffs. Giancarlo Corsetti on why the dollar fell after Liberation Day when tariffs should, in theory, have pushed it the other way.
Related reading on VoxEU.org

Trump and Tariffs, a VoxEU debate page collecting research on how the 2025 tariffs are reshaping supply chains, trade relationships and market stability.

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris School of Economics.
Tariffs move trade around, but so does economic power. When one economy dominates, other countries fall into step with it. They trade with the dominant economy, and also with each other. 
Alberto Martin (Barcelona School of Economics, CEPR) is one of a team that has tracked the influence of hegemons, large dominant economies, on trade from the start of the 19th century. In  our latest VoxTalk he tells Tim Phillips about how they used treaties (not necessarily about trade) as a proxy for alignment, and built a database of 77,000 of them signed between 1800 and 2020 to test their theory.
Hegemons sign a disproportionate share of these international agreements. After treaty-signing, trade links become stronger. But treaty-signing has fallen sharply over the past 15 years, as much as it did during the two world wars. If we are heading towards a multipolar world, might what will the absence of a global hegemony do to trade?
The research behind this episode:
Broner, Fernando, Alberto Martin, Josefin Meyer, and Christoph Trebesch. 2025. "Hegemonic Globalization." CEPR Discussion Paper 20339 (gated).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Alberto Martin. 2025. "How superpowers shape trade." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Alberto Martin is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Research in International Economics (CREI), an Adjunct Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a Research Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, where he directs the International Macroeconomics and Finance programme. His research spans macroeconomics, finance, and international economics, including asset bubbles, credit cycles, sovereign debt, and the political economy of trade.
Research cited in this episode

Global Treaty Database. The dataset at the heart of the paper, assembled by the authors from the United Nations Treaty Collection, the League of Nations archive, and country-specific historical sources. It records roughly 77,000 international agreements signed between 1800 and 2020, most of them bilateral, sorted into economic and non-economic categories such as trade, taxation, migration, borders, and military cooperation.
Hegemonic stability. The idea, introduced by Charles Kindleberger in 1973, that an open and stable world economy needs a single dominant power to underwrite it. This paper builds a formal model of the mechanism Kindleberger described, and asks what happens to openness when dominance is contested.
Alignment and UN voting. The most common existing proxy for how closely two countries are aligned is whether they vote together at the United Nations. The authors' treaty measure correlates with UN voting in some periods and less in others, partly because many UN votes turn on narrow questions; treaties cover more policy areas and reach back 200 years, which UN voting cannot.
The recent decline in treaty-signing. Since 1800 treaty-signing has trended upward, interrupted by three sharp falls: the First World War, the Second World War, and a decline over the last 15 years that is proportionally comparable to the first two. The authors checked large-country sources directly to rule out a reporting lag, and the fall appears real.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

The safety paradox. Isabelle Méjean on how, when countries impose trade restriction to protect themselves, it also makes conflict more likely. 
Related reading on VoxEU.org

Why globalisation needs a leader: Hegemons, alignment, and trade, the authors' own VoxEU column setting out the theory of hegemonic globalisation and what a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world might mean for trade.
From bilateralism to a system: Europe's early trade treaties and lessons for EU trade policy in a contested world, a VoxEU column by Laura Panza and Maria Ptashkina drawing on nearly 900 commercial treaties from 1815 to 1919 to argue for expanding networks of agreements even without universal multilateralism.

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris.

In 2019 the IMF called the increasing adoption of industrial policy: "The return of the policy that shall not be named". No one is scared to name it in 2026. Governments in rich and poor economies alike are intervening to change what their countries produce, and the pace has picked up sharply.
Zsóka Kóczán (EBRD) was one of the leads on the Transition Report 2024-25, which draws on a database of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies. She talks to Tim Phillips about who is using these policies, and the mistakes that happen when they aren't managed well. They multiply before elections, they discriminate against foreign interests, many are firm-specific - and until recently few had an end date, whether they worked or not. Picking winners is hard. Letting go of losers is even harder, she warns. 
The research behind this episode:
EBRD. 2024. "Transition Report 2024-25: Navigating Industrial Policy." London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The digital edition, with country assessments and interactive charts, is at 2024.tr-ebrd.com.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Zsoka Koczan. 2026. "Navigating industrial policy." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Zsoka Koczan is Associate Director and Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where she works on the Transition Report, edits the Regional Economic Prospects and runs the Life in Transition Survey. Before joining the EBRD she was an economist at the International Monetary Fund. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge, and her research spans income disparities within countries, migration and inequality.
Research cited in this episode

Moving the goalposts. The analysis of industrial policy objectives in the report is developed in Koczan, Zsoka, Victoria Marino, and Alexander Plekhanov. 2025. "Moving the Goalposts: The Changing Objectives of Industrial Policy." EBRD Working Paper No. 311. It codifies the stated objectives of more than 31,000 industrial policies using large language model processing; in the EBRD regions and other emerging markets, around 75% of policies pursue multiple objectives, and more than 10% pursue three or more.
The Juhász, Lane, Oehlsen and Pérez dataset. The report builds on the industrial policy dataset assembled by Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, Emily Oehlsen, and Verónica C. Pérez in "The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach" (STEG Working Paper No. WP050, 2023), which uses natural language processing to identify industrial policies in the Global Trade Alert repository; the EBRD team extended its coverage of emerging markets.
The Global Trade Alert. An independent monitoring initiative that has documented policy interventions affecting international commerce since 2009; it is the underlying source for both datasets above.
The policy that shall not be named. Cherif, Reda, and Fuad Hasanov. 2019. "The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named: Principles of Industrial Policy." IMF Working Paper No. 19/74. The title captures how unfashionable the subject was among economists before its recent revival, which is Koczan's point in raising it; the interventions themselves never went away.
Reagan's nine words. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan remarked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Koczan cites the line as a marker of the era when industrial policy fell out of favour, and as a reminder that government failures can replace the market failures these policies are meant to correct.
The Industrial Accelerator Act. The European Commission's proposal, presented in March 2026, would introduce "Made in EU" and low-carbon requirements for public procurement and support schemes in strategic sectors. Koczan cites it as evidence that the upward trend in industrial policy adoption is continuing.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Europe in the Middle, recorded at the same forum, in which Pol Antras and Beata Javorcik ask how Europe should make policy when it is caught between the US and China in a realigning world trade system.
Addressing Global Imbalances, also from the forum, in which Gita Gopinath and Philip Lane discuss the third wave of global imbalances and what central banks can and cannot do about it.
Related reading on VoxEU

The visible hand of the state: Industrial policies in emerging markets, a VoxEU column by the EBRD team presenting the Transition Report's findings on how emerging markets use industrial policy.
The new economics of industrial policy, a VoxEU column by Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane and Dani Rodrik summarising the recent empirical literature on when these policies work.
The return of industrial policy in data, a VoxEU column introducing the New Industrial Policy Observatory and documenting the recent wave of interventions.

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris School of Economics, June 2026.

In 1941 the United States banned oil exports to Japan, to punish aggression without fighting a war. Historians now argue the embargo did the opposite, and hastened Japan's entry into the war.
Isabelle Méjean (Sciences Po, CEPR) calls this "The safety paradox". Trade between rivals makes war more expensive. Cut that trade to protect your interests, and you make conflict cheaper, for your rival as well as for you. In a new VoxTalk she talks to Tim Phillips about economic coercion, decoupling, and why Europe should treat its trade agreements as insurance.
Méjean and her co-authors simulated the US decoupling from China. Raising tariffs by 20 percentage points, roughly what the first Trump administration did, raises the probability of war by 2%, she estimates. That sounds small until you consider what a war between the US and China would mean.
The research behind this episode:
Mayer, Thierry, Isabelle Méjean, and Mathias Thoenig. 2025. "The Fragmentation Paradox: De-risking Trade and Global Safety." CEPR Discussion Paper 20564 (gated).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Isabelle Méjean. 2026. "The Safety Paradox." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Isabelle Méjean is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, where she directs the International Trade and Regional Economics programme and is a member of the Research Policy Network on Geoeconomics and Security. She is a scientific advisor at CEPII and a member of the French Conseil d'Analyse Économique, with research spanning international trade, firm-to-firm networks, and how shocks to individual firms move whole economies. In 2020 she was named Best Young Economist of France.
Research cited in this episode

Make Trade Not War? Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer, and Mathias Thoenig's 2008 paper in the Review of Economic Studies (75(3): 865-900) provided the first quantitative evidence that bilateral trade integration reduces the probability of interstate conflict; the diplomatic game in the new paper builds directly on it.
Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois (1748). The earliest statement of the idea, Méjean notes, that interdependence between nations raises the cost of conflict and strengthens the hand of diplomacy; what was trade dependence in the 18th century now includes finance and technology.
The US oil embargo on Japan, 1941. Méjean's historical example of the safety paradox in action; a policy designed to impose costs on Japan is widely credited by historians with accelerating its entry into the Second World War.
China's trade ban on Lithuania. After Lithuania allowed a Taiwanese representative office to open in Vilnius in 2021, China blocked Lithuanian products from its market; the episode's example of open economic coercion, and one that prompted the EU's Anti-Coercion Instrument, in force since 2023.
Liberation Day tariffs. The US tariffs announced in April 2025; Méjean points to the tariff on Brazil, justified by the treatment of former president Jair Bolsonaro, as a tariff with an explicitly geopolitical rather than economic purpose.
Rare earths. China holds a near monopoly across mining, refining, and magnet production; Méjean's example of where future trade agreements could act as insurance, because deposits outside China offer more scope for diversification than mining in Europe.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Europe in the Middle. Pol Antras and Beata Javorcik, recorded at the same forum, on what the US-China realignment means for European producers and consumers.
World War Trade. Richard Baldwin on how world trade was weaponised, and where the trading order goes from here.
Trading Around Geopolitics. Giancarlo Corsetti, Banu Demir, and Beata Javorcik on why trade sanctions can be like squeezing a balloon.
Related reading on VoxEU

Why 'de-risking' may not deliver a large peace dividend, a VoxEU column estimating that a doubling of bilateral trade reduces the probability of militarised conflict by roughly 30%.
How geopolitics is changing trade, a VoxEU column documenting the fragmentation of trade flows along geopolitical lines.
Geopolitical risk and supply chain diversification, a VoxEU column on how firms respond to geopolitical risk in their sourcing decisions.

French teenagers carry a smartphone with access to almost anything, but few of them have been using it to read the news.
Julia Cagé (Sciences Po, CEPR) ran an experiment to test the one barrier everyone assumes matters most: the price of a newspaper. She and her co-authors gave free digital subscriptions to Le Monde and media education to thousands of French high school students for a year, and then tracked what the students actually read. It's a bit like persuading kids to eat vegetables when there are fries on the table, she tells Tim Phillips. Can a free subscription persuade France's teens to use their phones differently and eat their media greens, and what changes when they do?
The research behind this episode:
Briole, Simon, Julia Cagé, and Andrea Prat. 2026. "Making Teenagers Read Newspapers: A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools." CEPR Discussion Paper 21706. Gated.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Julia Cagé. 2026. “Making teenagers read newspapers”. VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Julia Cagé is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po Paris and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), where she leads the CEPR Research and Policy Network on Media Plurality. Her research spans media economics, political participation, and the economics of information, with a particular focus on how news markets shape political knowledge and democratic engagement. She is the author of several books on the media, including Saving the Media and The Price of Democracy.
Research cited in this episode

Reuters Institute Digital News Report is an annual global survey that tracks how people find, consume, and pay for news across dozens of countries. Cagé cites its long-running data on declining time spent reading news online, a trend she says is sharpest among the young.
Post-Broadcast Democracy, a book by the political scientist Markus Prior, argues that the shift from a small number of broadcast TV channels to an environment of unlimited media choice let people who were never especially interested in news opt out of it entirely. Cagé uses Prior's framework to argue that the internet did not create this problem; television did, and the internet simply deepened it.
Information inequality describes the finding that lower-income, less-educated citizens draw on fewer sources of political information than wealthier, better-educated ones, widening gaps in political knowledge. The concept draws on earlier work by Cagé's co-author Andrea Prat, and it motivates the experiment's focus on whether free access to quality journalism narrows that gap for teenagers from poorer backgrounds.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Misinformation and trust in news, in which Ruben Durante discusses a field experiment testing how AI-generated misinformation changes readers' trust in, and demand for, credible journalism.
Related reading on VoxEU

Information inequality, a VoxEU column by Paul Kennedy and Andrea Prat setting out the cross-country evidence that poorer, less-educated voters consume fewer sources of political news, the pattern this episode's experiment sets out to address.