Economics & Global Affairs

According to the traditional rules of politics, the US Federal Reserve and President Joe Biden’s administration should get credit for America’s relatively painless escape from inflation, regardless of whether their past policies helped create it. But do they really deserve it?

Joseph Nye writes that Washington's strategy towards Beijing should be to avoid either a hot or cold war, co-operate when possible and marshal its assets to shape China's external behaviour. This can be done through deterrence and a strengthening of both alliances and international institutions.

This report, by Maxwell Simon (MPP '23) and Jayaram Ravi (MPP '23), explores the drivers of setback and success that China has encountered in the process of developing dual-use and military-dedicated naval installations abroad. It looks at cases where China has considered or actively pursued military-dedicated installations to characterize Beijing’s general approach to overseas naval base acquisition.

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

Economic historian Emma Rothschild, the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard, lauded the efforts of young scholars to discover local solutions to mitigate the impacts of global climate change in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

Mohammad Tabaar analyzes Iran's strategy to weaken Israel and divide the Middle East.

In the absence of an alternative shorthand, politicians and journalists most likely will continue to use "Global South" for the foreseeable future. Yet anyone interested in a more accurate description of the world should be wary of such a misleading and increasingly loaded term.

Ten years ago this November, the 18th Central Committee of China’s Communist Party held its quinquennial Third Plenum.  The meeting decided on a set of reforms that were well-chosen to sustain the national growth rate.  But the reforms have not been implemented, contributing to a big slowdown in the economy.

1. The decline in Chinese growth

As of ten years ago, 2013, a naive extrapolation of the differential in growth rates between China and the US suggested that the number two economy would overtake the number one economy by 2021 (when GDPs are compared using nominal exchange rates). Some even said the cross-over year would be 2019. This did not happen; the US economy remains far ahead.  Goldman Sachs and others now project that China’s GDP will not catch up with US GDP until 2035, if ever.  Even if the crossover occurs, it may be only temporary.  The Chinese economy is forecast to peak sometime in the middle of the century, after which the ongoing decline in the labor force will outweigh productivity growth.  This drastic revision of crossover forecasts is one indication of how sharply trend growth in the Middle Kingdom has been revised downward since 2013.

China’s ongoing economic slowdown is partly the result of its failure to implement crucial structural reforms that would have enabled it to escape the middle-income trap. While previous Chinese leaders saw economic prosperity as the key to maintaining popular support, Xi Jinping has prioritized political control over growth.

Oil prices have been persistently high over the past two years , at times breaking above $120 a barrel. According to economic theory, that should be good news for climate change. But the political reality is more complicated. Climate policies are increasingly the casualties of high oil prices.