Tag Archives: Dani Rodrik

Why American policymakers shouldn’t conflate reasserting its global primacy with establishing a more secure world COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | When I started teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the mid-1980s, competition with Japan was the dominant preoccupation of U.S. economic policy. The book `Japan as Number One’ by Harvard’s …

  Economists should be humble when they recommend (or dismiss) various inflation-fighting strategies COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | The specter of inflation is once again stalking the world after a long period of dormancy during which policymakers were more likely to be preoccupied by price deflation. Now, old debates have …

  To appeal to the 70-plus million Americans who backed Trump, they must solve deep-rooted economic problems COMMENT | DANI RODIK | As Joe Biden eked out a victory in the U.S. presidential election after a few suspenseful days, observers of American democracy were left scratching their heads. Buoyed by …

Private firms undertake the bulk of R&D but governments fund it and must offer it direction COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | Innovation is the engine that drives contemporary economies. Living standards are determined by productivity growth, which in turn depends on the introduction and dissemination of new technologies that allow …

  Will economists prove more helpful today, when the challenges are as pressing as the Great Depression? COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | At the end of 1933, John Maynard Keynes sent a remarkable public letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR had taken office earlier that year, in the midst …

Every economy today has patterns of inequality, exclusion, and polarisation due to labour force segmentation Project Syndicate | Dani Rodrik | Around the world today, the central challenge for achieving inclusive economic prosperity is the creation of sufficient numbers of “good jobs.” Without productive and dependable employment for the vast …

When illiberal democracy – or populism, combines with undemocratic liberalism to undermine liberal democracy COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | The crisis of liberal democracy is roundly decried today. Donald Trump’s presidency, the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and the electoral rise of other populists in Europe have underscored the threat …

Why one is almost always harmful, but the other can sometimes be justified in exceptional times COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | Populists in power have one thing in common: they regard limits on their power as undermining the will of the people. For many, this aversion to institutional constraints extends to …

Centrist politicians must engage in behavior so costly that a conventional politician would never emulate it COMMENT | DANI RODRIK | At a recent conference I attended, I was seated next to a prominent American trade policy expert. We began to talk about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which …

Even if compensation was a viable approach two decades ago, it no longer serves as a practical response to globalisation’s adverse effects By Dani Rodrik It appears that a new consensus has taken hold these days among the world’s business and policy elites about how to address the anti-globalisation backlash …