The consensus economic policy framework that evolved in the post-Bretton Woods era and the model of globalization to which it gave rise are in crisis due to political blowback. The framework has guided the system into a solution space that features stagnant growth and persistent deflationary...

The emerging data-driven economy (DDE) promises to intensify the distributional issues that have contributed to disruptive political change in recent years. This raises the question of whether there a solution space in this economy that allows markets to clear and societies to maintain...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) promises to have a modest impact on Canada, according to ground breaking research from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Better in than Out? Canada and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” authors Dan Ciuriak, Ali Dadkhah, and Jingliang Xiao, find that some sectors...

Canada is developing a progressive trade agenda (PTA) that is pitched as a response to the rise of anti-globalization populism. This note reviews the concept of the PTA, its motivation, the specific elements that comprise it, the likely efficacy of these measures in addressing the factors...

The dawn of a new economic era based on a new essential capital asset and new general purpose technologies provides a unifying framework to make sense of the rupture of the rules-based trading system, the flaring conflicts within states, and the eruption of a trade and technology war between...

The emergence of the data-driven economy has profound implications for the role for the state as economic agent, as regulator, and as the agent of power projection internationally to capture global rents. We focus on the role of data as a capital asset, compare the characteristics of data in...

Big data, exploited by ever more powerful AI and machine-learning engines that extract previously unattainable information, is being monetized in various ways and is underpinning the market valuation of today's most valuable corporations. This has made data-generated rents the principal bone of...

Historically, conflict between states has centered on valuable prizes – assets that generated economic rents: land in the agrarian era, trade routes and ports and resources in the industrial mercantile era, intellectual property in the knowledge-based economy era, and now data in the...

With an increasing share of global commerce taking place in digital form or facilitated by digital platforms, it is becoming increasingly important to update the rules-based framework to accommodate and enable the development of the intangibles-based data-driven economy while reconciling the...