World industrial and export trends. One thing not much discussed in the economics blogosphere is the aenaemic growth in world trade. This has been about 3%pa over the last two years as opposed to 15%pa in the years before the financial crisis. It is particularly noticeable for developing countries where there has been a dramatic decline in export numbers but also true of the OECD countries. There are many explanations, the end of out-sourcing, the collapse in commodities etc, trade barriers and so on. But whatever the reason, it all feels as if something has changed in the world economic order. Something similar has happened to industrial production but it is not so pronounced, and is more a reflection of weakish overall economic growth. Here the noticeable point is that emerging market industrial production growth has fallen to that of the OECD, whereas it used to be more than twice as strong (only partly due to China)