Publications

Congress is right to flag Alipay over national security and data risks, but a blanket ban without first conducting audits or establishing reciprocity safeguards would be premature. Regulators should investigate the platform before Congress considers banning it.

New research shows that widely cited statistics on concentration, markups, and profits are often plagued by measurement and interpretation difficulties, meaning they cannot reliably be used to prove an economy-wide decline in competition.

WEF should articulate a global productivity agenda to make a meaningful contribution, because the kind of capitalism we have today is not the reason for slow growth in many developing economies.

Growing tensions between the United States and Europe over digital trade and technology regulation risk weakening the transatlantic alliance at a time of intensifying competition with China. Washington sees European rules as disproportionately targeting U.S. firms, while Europe views them as necessary to reduce dependence on American technology. Unless both sides address these differing threat perceptions and pursue regulatory compatibility, fragmentation could undermine their ability to shape global technology rules and allow China to fill the gap.

The inconsistent and flawed theories of harm on both sides of the Atlantic reflect, to borrow from former FTC Chair Lina Khan, a real “Amazon’s antitrust paradox,” if there ever was one.

The European Parliament has disabled built-in AI features on corporate tablets and phones issued to MEPs and staff over concerns that data sent to cloud services by these features presented a security risk. This decision is misguided because it does not address security risks, drives AI use into the shadows, disrupts everyday productivity tools, and imposes disproportionate costs on the Parliament’s smaller delegations.

AI-enabled “ghost student” scams are siphoning millions in federal financial aid by exploiting weak, document-based identity verification systems at U.S. colleges. While the Department of Education has tightened ID checks, Congress should establish interoperable, high-assurance digital IDs to prevent fraud at scale and ensure aid reaches real students.

In 2025, more than one-third of individuals (36.8 percent) used generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude.

The European Commission is challenging Meta’s decision to restrict third party AI assistants on WhatsApp, arguing it may violate competition rules. The argument here is that forcing Meta to open its platform would undermine its vertically integrated AI model, weaken incentives for continued investment, and introduce security and operational risks. At a critical moment in global AI competition, such regulatory actions could slow innovation at a leading American firm and advantage foreign competitors.

Over the last decade, U.S. trade performance has deteriorated significantly in advanced industries. That is a major problem because these industries have high fixed costs and require substantial investments in R&D, so they depend on large customer bases to achieve scale economies and remain globally competitive.