Establishing disciplines on the US trade remedy measures was in the view of Canadian policymakers the single most important demand that Canada tabled in the free trade negotiations with the United States leading up to the 1989 Canada-US FTA. The outcome was the Chapter 19 mechanism for...

The progressive shift of economic activity into the digital realm, including through digital and digitally-enabled trade, poses not only a wide range of conceptual issues which require discussion to support a shared understanding of risks and benefits, but promises to create perhaps...

The Trump Administration has pursued a sharply different – and for its trade partners unsettling – trade policy from that followed by the United States in the postwar period. While much attention has been focussed on the oftentimes contradictory, oftentimes theoretically unfounded, and...

The new “U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement” (USMCA) signed on 1 October 2018 sets out important markers concerning the future direction of Trump Administration trade policy. As consideration turns to the path to success in implementing this agreement, I will focus in my remarks today on what...

Technological change in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based on Big Data has profound implications for the way innovation is conducted and for the economy into which innovation flows. This note sketches out the implications of the evolving character of...

This policy brief tries to work out some of the implications for the Global South of the emergence of Industry 4.0 and the evolution toward a data-driven economy. The digital transformation provides developing economies new opportunities to leapfrog industrial age infrastructure, to draw on the...

The global economy is being reshaped through the overt use of economic power. This marks a point of rupture with the geoeconomic framework of the postwar period, which was largely built on the legalistic rules-based system that grew up under and around the GATT/WTO. In this essay, I interpret...

The trade war between the United States and China is generating significant costs; it is rooted in the technological revolution based on big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, which create the grounds for strategic trade and investment policies and geostrategic rivalry; and...

China appears to have been surprised by the sharp escalation of its rivalry with the United States into a full-blown trade war – and also to have initially mis-read the situation as one it could dispose of by writing a cheque before getting on with business as usual. I argue that there are...

The history of banking crises grows richer with each passing decade, indeed with each passing year. Theories abound: the inherent instability of fractional reserve systems, systemic shocks that overwhelm risk management defenses, myopic optimism, a failure to regulate enough, too much regulation...