Articles

The small open economies of the Gulf and Southeast Asia are pioneers in the establishment of

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). The SWFs of countries like Qatar and Singapore are among the

world’s largest in terms of total asset size relative to Gross Domestic Product. This article looks

at the different compulsions behind the setting up of SWFs by small open economies.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.

China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, accounting for one-quarter of the global total in 2013. Although the country has successfully lowered the rate of emissions from industry in some cities through improved technology and energy-efficiency measures, rapid economic growth means that more emissions are being added than removed. Without mitigation, China's CO2 emissions will rise by more than 50% in the next 15 years.

Policymakers have long focused on preventing nuclear weapons proliferation by controlling technology. Even developing countries, however, may now possess the technical ability to create nuclear weapons. The history of gas centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective. To reduce the demand for nuclear weapons, policymakers will have look toward the cultural, normative, and political organization of the world.

The central purpose of this article is to establish the relationship between power projection, technology, and economic power. How economically powerful does a state need to be before it can afford the capital intensive technologies, foreign bases, and military and logistical forces associated with global power projection? The specific research question we focus on in this article is: What determines how far states send their military forces? We argue that as the costs associated with projecting power decrease or as the wealth necessary to project power increases, states will project power more frequently and at greater distances. We use a system level time series analysis from 1870–1936 and a dispute level analysis on all militarized international disputes from 1870–2000 to test these propositions. This article is the first to demonstrate empirically that the distance and frequency of power projection is a function of the cost of projecting power. We close with a discussion of contemporary states building power projection capabilities and how future research might build from our research to explain this behavior.

Using the bidding prices of participants in China's national wind project concession programs from 2003 to 2007, this paper built up a learning curve model to estimate the joint learning from learning-by-doing and learning-by-searching, with a novel knowledge stock metric based on technology adoption in China through both domestic technology development and international technology transfer. The paper describes, for the first time, the evolution of the price of wind power in China, and provides estimates of how technology adoption, experience building wind farm projects, wind turbine manufacturing localization, and wind farm economies of scale have influenced the price of wind power.

"The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren't fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government's dealings with the region."