Europe’s goods trade deficit with China keeps widening

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CHART 1 • Europe’s goods trade deficit with China keeps widening

Europe wants to talk about strategic autonomy. The goods trade account keeps interrupting. The EU still buys far more from China than it sells there.

Eurostat data put the 2025 deficit at roughly 360 billion euros, with early 2026 figures showing the pressure continuing. That imbalance sits behind the fights over electric vehicles, batteries, solar equipment, critical minerals and industrial subsidies.

A bilateral deficit is not automatically a policy failure. Imports can make consumers better off, and supply chains are complicated. The problem is political dependency. Europe wants industrial strength while its trade flows keep proving how much production power still sits elsewhere.

Source: Bloomberg

Globalisation did not disappear. It became more conditional. The same systems that lower costs in calm periods transmit stress when politics, war or chokepoints interrupt them.

The rest of the issue follows those interruptions through ports, tankers, Ukraine aid and European households. The result is less a grand theory than a practical warning: the world economy is still physical enough to be blocked, delayed and repriced.