The standoff between Washington and Beijing will drag on for some time despite recent messages from President Donald Trump stating that progress had been made in the trade talks, economist Michael Spence told CNBC Monday.

Trump tweeted last week that he had "a long and very good" conversation with the Chinese president, which included discussions on trade. He also said that negotiations were "moving along nicely," which drove global equities higher.

But according to Spence, a Canadian-American economist who won the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, this back and forth will continue for some time.

"The fundamental reason is that if you go back 10 or 15 years, everybody thought that some kind of conversion was going to occur in terms of governance and economic systems and it would be easier to work these things out," he said.

"(But) it's pretty clear that's not going to happen, so what we have is a much more complicated challenge, working out mutually-beneficial arrangements between very different systems," he added.