Research Library

Despite recent claims that “free trade is dead,” fellow Simon Lester explains that America was never close to anything resembling free trade in the first place. Instead, current U.S. trade policy, just like past policy, reflects a messy mix of free market and industrial policy views.

As the U.S. doubles down on trade protectionism, it risks weakening the global trade system and harming the American businesses, workers and consumers it aims to protect.

With the recent enactment of the CHIPS and Science Act, the conversation about industrial policy has started up again. Are state-directed economic policies back, and will such initiatives work?

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s investment policies, which aim to return Mexico to the protectionist, state-led policies of the 1960s and 1970s, seem almost certain to stagnate the country’s economy.

Whereas the process for Canada, Mexico and the U.S. to resolve disputes under NAFTA proved highly ineffective, the equivalent procedures under the USMCA are working very well, explains David Gantz. Read his post on the Baker Institute Blog.

China’s request for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, from which the U.S. withdrew in 2017, creates diplomatic challenges for the U.S. as well as foreign policy hurdles for current CPTPP members, the authors write.

The Covid-19 pandemic may spur a period of "economic Darwinism," finishing off weak businesses and favoring wealthy nations, write the authors.

Days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, William Martin, the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Senior Fellow in Religion and Public Policy and Chavanne Emeritus Professor in Rice’s Department of Sociology, spoke to a gathering of Rice University students, faculty and staff. These are his remarks. 

As the UK digests the domestic implications of the Leave vote, middle class voters across the world's most advanced economies have awoken to three flaws in the standard case for further global integration.