The sectors that have suffered the most in the pandemic are laggard sectors—laggard, that is, in moving from old-fashioned, labor-intensive and low-wage business models to innovative, capital-intensive, technology- and skilled-based ways of delivering goods and services. Upgrading these backward industries into high-wage, technology-intensive sectors must be a priority.
Publications
March 10, 2021
To advance their goals of economic redistribution, progressives—relying on faulty research, half-truths, and erroneous claims—have delegitimized the long-accepted “consumer welfare” approach to antitrust and generated a groundswell of support for a new “public interest” standard that seeks to protect competitors, especially small businesses.
March 9, 2021
Amidst an unprecedented pace of innovation, some 90 developing nations, led by India and South Africa, have petitioned the WTO’s TRIPS Council calling for a waiver to suspend all IP rights associated with COVID-19 innovations—again asserting the false narrative that IP rights inhibit access to medicines.
March 8, 2021
“Anti-monopoly” is now the solution de jour for all that ails the U.S. economy, just as it was in the early New Deal. That latest example of this trend is the “Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act” (or “CALERA”), introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, in an effort to “better protect competition in the American economy.”
March 8, 2021
The Biden administration’s infrastructure package should include $5 billion over five years in cost-shared demonstration projects that seek to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heavy industries such as steel, cement, and chemicals.
March 8, 2021
These strong effects point to the tremendous spillover benefits that medical innovations have on the labor market and the economy as a whole.
March 8, 2021
There weren’t many Chinese tech companies that the Trump administration didn’t sanction or at least threaten. What did that achieve in the technological race with China? What was the impact on the American brand writ large? And what should the Biden administration do next?
March 7, 2021
Passing a time-limited tax incentive for firms that move Chinese production to U.S. Labor Department–designated “labor surplus areas” would weaken China’s economic and technological capabilities by reducing production there while strengthening U.S. capabilities by increasing domestic production, and it would help economically distressed and disadvantaged cities and counties across the nation.
March 4, 2021
AR/VR devices create novel issues for user privacy due to the scope, scale, and sensitivity of the information they collect. To mitigate harms, policymakers should reform the current patchwork regulatory landscape for data privacy, which fails to address some risks while over-regulating in response to others.
March 3, 2021
ITIF President Robert D. Atkinson and other former members of the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission believe now is the time for Congress to take the next steps to transitioning the federal surface transportation funding system away from the fuel tax and toward a VMT.