An economic interpretation of history suggests that war is a continuation of economic rivalry in pursuit of the object of desire in economics – economic rent. For the Middle East, competition for control of its vast oil reserves subjected it to the “natural resource curse” of...

The fourth Taiwan Strait crisis has spiked US-China tensions at a parlous moment for the world. Triggered by the brief visit of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to Taipei and China’s escalation of military exercises around Taiwan (including live fire drills in six...

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...

The development of new general purpose technologies centred on the nexus of Big Data, machine learning and artificial intelligence is transforming and disrupting established economic structures and markets, creating prospects for massive economic rents that incentivize strategic trade and...

The current opportunities for Canada’s reengagement with the United States present themselves at a moment of profound changes in economic thinking in the United States and beyond. There are many factors behind the renewed interest in industrial policy, including the experience of the COVID-19...

In the era of continuous and steadily accelerating technological change that started with the industrial revolution, economies and societies were repeatedly transformed in ways that can be linked to ownership of the essential and scarce factor of production of the day and command of the economic...