The Global Mercantilist Index: A New Approach to Ranking Nations’ Trade Policies

Countries’ use of mercantilist economic policies has expanded dramatically, particularly in emerging economies such as Brazil, China, and India. These practices, such as forced technology transfer, local production as a condition of market access, intellectual property theft, restrictions on cross-border data flows, “indigenous innovation” and others, distort trade and investment and damage both the U.S. and global economies.

To date there has been no systematic way to identify which nations are engaged in the most egregious mercantilist practices and which most damage the U.S. economy. This event will feature the release of an ITIF report the “Global Mercantilist Index” (GMI), which uses a comprehensive method to rank nations on 16 mercantilist policies while then proposing new policy tools to address the problems. The event will further discuss how the United States can lead development of a new global trade regime that favors rules- and market-based trade while supporting the modern knowledge- and innovation-based global economy.

This event is free, open to the public and complies with ethics rules. A live webcast will be available on this page. Webcast works best in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.