Publications: Robert D. Atkinson

What’s more likely to boost growth and tech leadership: a targeted innovation strategy for robotics or one focused on cleaner oceans? Just asking.

There are two core reasons for manufacturing decline denialism: fear of protectionism and blind faith in market forces.

The reality is that if the United States doesn’t become more like China, it will lose the battle for advanced technology leadership.

Only in the United States is gutting a world-leading firm seen as a policy win. No other government would be insane enough to attack its own national champions the way American antitrust enforcers do.

Regulating how AI is used—not how it's built—is the only way to protect innovation and give small startups a fair shot.

Foreign governments are systematically deploying policies that constitute non-tariff attacks (NTAs) on America’s leading technology companies. ITIF and other think tank scholars and policy experts urge the administration to put these unfair NTAs on the U.S. trade agenda and insist that America’s trading partners address them.

Congress has authorized $20 billion over five years to fund the National Science Foundation’s Technology Innovation Partnership, but lawmakers have appropriated just $410 million. To win the techno-economic war with China, America needs the TIP directorate to be fully funded.

If the Starmer government thinks for one minute that the PRC will allow the UK to expand exports of anything with any real strategic importance, it is gravely mistaken. It’s time for competitive realism.

For Trump, it’s a new world and Korean President Lee Jae Myung and his administration needs to treat it as such by negotiating a new deal that preserves Korean market access to America in exchange for real concessions on what at the end of the day are relatively minor things for Korean economic competitiveness.

Rostow’s model suggests that stage five is the ultimate destination. A better model sees no fixed stages and certainly no permanent peak, only a relentless push to go higher and higher.