National Competitiveness

Please join ITIF for an important policy conference on what U.S. policymakers must do to prevent America from suffering a catastrophic defeat in its techno-economic-trade war with China. At stake are vital production capabilities in the advanced, traded-sector industries that provide the foundation for economic strength and national security in the 21st century.

Please join ITIF for a virtual panel featuring authors of a new book by MIT Press, Priority Technologies: Ensuring US Security and Shared Prosperity. Experts will discuss how to strengthen U.S. innovation and industrial ecosystems and which priority technologies will be critical to long-term global economic, military, and technological leadership in the decades ahead.

Joseph V. Coniglio joins guest Jonathan Barnett, Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law, at the 2026 Antitrust Spring Meeting. They discuss Barnett’s new ITIF report, Europe’s innovation gap, and China’s mercantilist use of competition law.

Watch ITIF’s Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness' webinar featuring leading experts who will discuss what is driving Canada’s capital exodus and what it will take to fix it.

China should come into full and immediate compliance with its WTO commitments; otherwise, as a last resort, the U.S. government should revoke China’s PNTR status. But policymakers should mitigate second-order effects, particularly on national power industries.

As of 2022, China is producing over 35 percent of the publications in top-tier journals, up from nearly zero in 1980. At the same time, the United States has seen its share fall rapidly to about 25 percent.

To avoid losing the techno-economic trade war with China, U.S. policymakers must rewrite the social contract at the heart of America’s 50-year-old system of financial capitalism by rebalancing the incentives to drive long-term investments in U.S. national power industries.

Sales of Chinese hybrids and plug-in hybrids in Europe increased by a factor of 14 between August 2024 and August 2025

Countries in the Global South are key markets for Chinese and U.S.-allied national power industries, which require scale economies to flourish. U.S. policymakers should stop viewing them as a “backyard” and recognize that they are a key battlefield in an industrial war.

Fixing the EU’s productivity, innovation, and competitiveness crisis requires a fundamental political reorientation. Until it makes that shift, expect more reports, more tinkering, and more decline.