‍France

As the French presidential election approaches, we’ve added polls data from the French polling institute Ifop.

The elections are organised as two rounds, with the top two candidates in the first round (10 April) going into the second two weeks later.

The first chart displays the current voting intentions, with incumbent president Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen qualifying for the second round. The dynamic among the right and far-right candidates has been changing in the past weeks. Le Pen has been getting some tailwind from the recent popularity drop of Eric Zemmour and Valérie Pécresse.

We also provide polls data for the second round of the election. Worryingly for Macron, his margin against the far-right candidate is shrinking, especially compared to the actual results of the previous election in 2017, when Macron won with 66% of the votes against Le Pen.

World: Kiel Institute

Over the past two weeks, we’ve also added the Kiel Trade Indicator (KTI) dataset from the Kiel Institute.

The main dataset estimates monthly trade flows for 75 countries by analysing ship movements in real-time. More information about the dataset and methodology can be found here.

The underlying data collected by the Kiel Institute is also used to create daily shipping indicators. In the first chart below, we displayed the freight activity in the Red Sea, which is a proxy for trading activity between Europe and Asia and compared it with the main CPB World Trade Index. The current freight activity is now decreasing year on year, indicating a slowdown of global trade in the past two months.

In the second chart, we focused on supply-chain bottlenecks, displaying a series measuring the proportion of goods that are on waiting container ships. This essentially reflects the percentage share of goods ‘stuck’ in the sea. This variable is estimated by the Kiel Institute using real-time global vessel position data, combined with the effective use of container ships from draught information. The second pane contains ports congestion indicators, grouped by main hub and region.

While ports congestion is decreasing across the world, bottlenecks remain due to the lagging effect between unloading containers and a reduced congestion; it simply takes time to unload container ships, and so it will take a few more months for the percentage of goods in ‘waiting container ships’ to decrease significantly.

South Korea

In the context of supply-chain issues and rising shipping costs, the South Korean customs service started to publish an interesting dataset tracking the average costs of freights per destination.

The chart below displays how the freight rates have evolved since 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic. In just two years’ time, freight rates between South Korea and China have tripled, but this is just one of the smallest increases: freights costs between Europe and South Korea have multiplied by eight in the past two years.

China

For China, we’ve added a new dataset from the National Development & Reform Commission (NDRC), covering the main residential utilities costs: electricity, pipe natural gas, and liquefied petroleum gas.

The chart below compares the percentage change of these utilities with the housing component of inflation. While electricity and natural gas do not change much year on year, petroleum gas costs seem to be one of the main drivers behind the movement in housing costs.