An increasingly digitalized global economy requires ever-more digitally skilled workforces for nations to remain productive. Unfortunately, domestic and international assessments of digital skills show the United States is lagging its competitors.
America has lost 70 percent of its semiconductor manufacturing capacity over the last three decades. That serves as a harsh lesson for policymakers: Failing to maintain a supportive policy environment could set up other high-tech industries to falter, too.
Report for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute: Instead of succumbing to the “small is beautiful, big is ugly” narrative, Canada must recognize the critical role large businesses play in a growing, competitive economy with high productivity and wages.
Banning personalized ads would threaten about €6 billion of income for the European app economy—a sector that employs 1.5 million people in the EU.
AR/VR technologies have transformative potential in everything from entertainment and communication to workforce development and education. But they also raise unique considerations on issues that policymakers are grappling with in relation to other technologies, such as privacy, safety, security, and equity.
Standards-setting bodies for 5G technology appear to be working well, but U.S. policymakers are justifiably wary of China’s ambitions to manipulate the system. They should stay on guard and provide financial support for U.S. companies to participate.
Prohibiting companies from favoring their own products ignores all the ways it promotes competition and benefits consumers. Antitrust reforms should differentiate that pro-competitive self-preferencing from certain exclusionary practices.
Open Radio Access Networks (Open RANs) would define open standards and interfaces between components of wireless RANs, providing a unique opportunity to diversify the supply chain by separating today’s integrated, single-provider RAN systems into modular parts.
Displaying regulatory and other product information electronically is more practical than using small, confusing physical labels. But countries need to align their approaches to “e-labels” in order to maximize their benefits and avoid creating a new barrier to trade and innovation.
Economic, trade, innovation, and global value chain (GVC) linkages between the United States and Taiwan are vitally important to both nations’ advanced technology industries and broader economies. Policymakers should work to deepen them.
To meet growing global demand for energy services while averting the worst consequences of climate change, the world must accelerate clean energy innovation. Western Europe contributes most to this global process. The United States has faltered. And China has a long way to go.
Productivity growth is the most important factor in economic performance, yet economists and policymakers give it little attention. It is time to develop a national productivity strategy with sector-specific analyses and policies at its core.
The federal government has long avoided industrial policies outside of its defense sector. But now, facing competition from China, it is pursuing a series of new programs at a scale never tried before. The effort will require careful, system-wide planning to bear fruit.
The neo-Brandeisian case for more aggressive merger reviews assumes that market concentration is out of control and enforcement has been too lax. Neither is true. Antitrust regulators should recognize that mergers can contribute to innovation, productivity, and competition.
Levying carbon tariffs is a difficult and counterproductive way for nations with ambitious climate policies to create a level playing field for their higher-cost industrial sectors. A more workable solution would be to design a flexible open-trade club for climate innovators.
Expanding the 25-year-old trade agreement that eliminates tariffs on ICT goods would spur broad-based growth for countries that sign on, because lowering prices increases ICT adoption, which spurs productivity and innovation throughout the economy.
As the Biden administration works with its EU counterparts through the new U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC), it should hold firm in defending the superior U.S. innovation system. To that end, U.S. negotiators must first clarify their positions on at least four strategic questions.
The prevailing narrative is that Americans work in an economy of growing job insecurity, and that new technologies like artificial intelligence have only made matters worse. In fact, jobs are more secure now than at any time since the mid-1990s.
Staring in 2022, a provision in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will require companies to start amortizing their R&D investments over five years instead of expensing them in the same year they incur the costs. Congress should repeal the rule before it takes effect. Otherwise, companies will do less research in the United States, jobs will be lost, and U.S. competitiveness will suffer.
Global attitudes toward China are hardening, but diverging interests prevent effective allied action to counter its rise. That’s why America should focus on getting its own house in order. The key is better aligning U.S. multinational corporations’ interests with national interests.
AR/VR solutions can enhance classroom experiences and expand opportunities at all levels of learning. The federal government should support further innovation by investing in research, skill-building, content development, and equitable adoption of immersive technologies.
Federal government agencies have missed multiple deadlines to transition from paper to web-based forms. Bringing government services into the digital age would build public trust, improve service and convenience, and reduce costs.
Given the transformative potential of AI for workforce decisions, policy should tilt toward enabling transformation with this technology.
The goal of antitrust reform should be to advance a modern approach to competition policy that elevates innovation to become a central concern for antitrust enforcement.
Nearly 20 years after joining the World Trade Organization, China remains woefully short of meeting a broad range of commitments and responsibilities, to the detriment of both its trading partners and the international economic system.
The AIA will cost the European economy €31 billion over the next five years and reduce AI investments by almost 20 percent. A European SME that deploys a high-risk AI system will incur compliance costs of up to €400,000 which would cause profits to decline by 40 percent.
Data-localization policies are spreading rapidly around the world. This measurably reduces trade, slows productivity, and increases prices for affected industries. Like-minded nations must work together to stem the tide and build an open, rules-based, and innovative digital economy.
For many progressives, anticorporatism is not just the means for achieving other policy goals, it is the main goal in and of itself: an economy rid of large corporations. If their movement prevails, the result will be slower growth, diminished competitiveness, and less opportunity.
Few would oppose the president’s stated goals of lowering prices, raising wages, and increasing convenience for Americans. But his executive order is not the way to achieve them.
If the U.S. government is going to develop more effective policies to spur competitiveness, growth, and opportunity it will need to support better data collection, particularly on firms, industries, and technologies.
No, local governments generally are not well-suited to providing broadband service. Economic theory suggests city-run broadband would not serve the country well, and previous real-world attempts bear that out with a mixed track record marked by several failures.
The United States needs an integrated national strategy to address the twin challenges of bolstering its manufacturing sector and averting climate change. Timely federal RD&D and deployment policies targeted to specific manufacturing industries could create comparative advantage, expanding domestic investment and employment.