Many say the decline in new business formation over the past 30 years has been caused by increased monopoly. But there is no statistical relationship between start-up creation and change in concentration by industry; high-growth start-up activity is healthy.
The rapid growth of large Internet platforms has caused some activists, scholars, and political officials to worry about their impact on competition. These concerns are largely misplaced.
If the United States is serious about maintaining its leadership in biopharmaceuticals, then it’s time for policymakers to articulate and embrace a robust sectoral competitiveness strategy.
U.S. broadband networks weathered the COVID-19 surge in traffic better than most peer nations. The pandemic should galvanize policymakers to ensure broadband can serve as an essential lifeline for everyone, including low-income and rural residents.
Law enforcement argues that “warrant-proof” encryption presents a unique and urgent threat by preventing them from accessing user data. But history shows that government efforts to subvert encryption would negatively impact individuals and businesses. As such, banning the technology is not the answer.
Not really. Despite the measured rise in concentration in some industries, in the vast majority of markets it remains well below the levels that would normally trigger antitrust concerns.
Alarmists claim the tech sector’s carbon footprint is mushrooming out of control. But they wildly misrepresent the facts. Not only is the ICT sector making significant progress in decarbonizing, but ICT is also a powerful technology that enables other sectors to become more energy efficient.
China’s state-backing of Huawei and ZTE allowed these companies to seize global market share from more innovative international competitors, reducing their growth in sales and investments in R&D. This, in turn, hurt global innovation in the industry.
FedRAMP—the government program that sets standards for assessing, authorizing, and monitoring the security of cloud systems—can significantly improve. Absent reform, it will hamper agencies’ adoption of cloud services.
COVID-19 has prompted calls for reshoring of medical goods, including strict “Buy American” prescriptions. While reshoring is important, “Buy American” fails to recognize the value of the global supply chain and avoids addressing the real problem, China.
The advocacy group’s annual report on Internet and digital media freedom is more polemic than dispassionate analysis. The State Department should stop funding it unless it focuses on true violations of Internet freedom, such as political persecution.
No, markups have increased only slightly in some industries—and have stayed the same overall—which refutes claims that market concentration is giving firms more pricing power.
Health data and digital technologies will be essential for improving global health outcomes beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Low- and middle-income nations, with fledgling digital health strategies and many barriers to overcome, stand to benefit the most.
In short: no. Profits are difficult to measure accurately, but the best method is to focus on domestic earnings outside the financial sector as a share of net value added. By that measure, the long-term trend has been in decline.
The United States is struggling to move innovative energy technologies from discovery to scale. This gap could put the climate and U.S. investments at risk. A nonprofit foundation working with the Department of Energy could help fill the gap.
Demonstrating the commercial viability of new technologies for deep decarbonization requires federal funding. But the government’s past record is decidedly mixed. So Congress should increase funding for demonstration projects while reforming how they are administered.
5G wireless will drive economic growth for decades to come, but we need a comprehensive strategy to ensure a robust deployment and adoption of secure networks. A U.S. strategy for 5G should play to our strengths to overcome unfair practices that have made Huawei a leader.
Further stimulus in response to the COVID-19 crisis should focus not just on short-term recovery, but also the long-term competitiveness of key technologically sophisticated, traded-sector industries. Now is the time to recognize America needs a robust industrial strategy.
ITIF tested the page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and accessibility of all 50 state unemployment websites using publicly available tools. The results show that many of these sites are not just ill-suited to handle significant rises in traffic, but also poorly designed.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in society’s digital readiness for social distancing. If policymakers seize the opportunity to address these gaps, they can make it easier to manage the next pandemic while providing significant long-term social and economic benefits.
The failure of small venture-backed businesses to qualify for Paycheck Protection Loans could cost more than 275,000 jobs this year directly and more 1 million jobs in total, including indirect losses. The Trump administration should waive the Small Business Administration’s “affiliation rule” in this crisis to prevent these mass layoffs and furloughs.
Geothermal energy has yet to follow the trajectory of rapidly expanding, cheap renewables like wind and solar. To unlock the enormous potential of this clean, reliable source of energy, the federal government can drive innovation and address barriers to adoption.
Lawmakers should make energy innovation a national imperative, and at least double U.S. investment in clean energy RD&D by 2025.
Countries that value an open, competitive digital economy should use surveys to improve quantitative analysis of cross-border data flows, because policymakers can’t effectively manage and address barriers to digital trade unless they can measure it.
As the House and Senate consider comprehensive energy legislation, these 10 priorities have already won the support of large bipartisan majorities at the committee level in at least one chamber. They should form the nucleus of a bipartisan energy package that gets signed into law this year.
The United States, the EU, and Japan must band together in stronger trilateral partnership to pressure China into rolling back the mercantilist trade practices it uses to grow advanced, innovation-driven industries.
An examination of the scholarly literature shows that China’s mercantilist-powered economic rise and trade expansion have slowed the progress of innovation in the global economy—particularly in North America and Europe.
The federal government should take aggressive steps to spur the development of more tech hubs in America’s heartland by identifying promising metro areas and helping them transform into self-sustaining innovation centers.
This provocative new book now available from The MIT Press shows small businesses are not the drivers of our prosperity. Big firms are better for job creation, productivity, innovation, and most other economic benefits. Governments should stop tipping the scales toward small and adopt “size neutral” policies that encourage companies of all sizes to grow.
The next wave of digital innovation is coming. Countries can welcome it, prepare for it, and ride it to new heights of innovation and prosperity, or they can ignore the changing tide and miss the wave.
With nearly three dozen new additions, the updated “Tech Policy To-Do List” now provides a menu of more than 150 actionable ideas for Congress and the administration to foster innovation, growth, and progress.
5G, AI, IoT, and more: In a reader-friendly series of two-pagers, ITIF provides overviews of important technologies that are likely to have a profound impact on the global economy and modern society.