A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper. In this paper, we provide a historical perspective on the interaction of household families, government agencies, and business enterprises, or what we call “the investment triad”, in providing a foundation for the accumulation...

Progress in artificial intelligence and related forms of automation technologies threatens to reverse the gains that developing countries and emerging markets have experienced from integrating into the world economy over the past half century, aggravating poverty and inequality. The new...

As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver...

The discovery and development of new medicines classically involves a linear process of basic biomedical research to uncover potential targets for drug action, followed by applied, or translational, research to identify candidate products and establish their effectiveness and safety. This...

In the decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans made historic gains in accessing employment opportunities in racially integrated workplaces in U.S. business firms and government agencies. In the previous working papers in this series, we have shown that in the 1960s and...

In less than three decades Mexico’s automotive industry has gone from a minor role to the 7th largest world producer of automotive vehicles. The Mexican experience is part of the more general case of the “integrated peripheries.” The development of these cannot be accounted for separately...

There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find. With the widespread plant...