Against this background of the opportunities and challenges of global markets, let me now concentrate on the economic and financial relations between Europe – or rather the euro area, to be more precise – and emerging Asia, specifically China, and on some of the challenges for policy. I will first focus on bilateral trade relations between China and the euro area.
China’s share in the euro area’s total imports has increased markedly over the past ten years, from 3.6% in 1994 to 8.6% in 2004 – a rise of five percentage points. 1 By comparison, the share of goods imported from China by the United States rose from 6% to 13.7% over the same period.