Research Library

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, once barred from entering the U.S., is getting a rock star welcome on his first trip here since being elected in May. “Am I the only India follower who is bored with Modi’s spectacle of a U.S. visit?” asks international economics fellow Russell Green. “The glitz is fun, but I am an economic policy wonk, and from my perspective, there is little to capture the imagination.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement offers an opportunity to deepen U.S.-Mexico economic ties without reopening the still contentious North American Free Trade Agreement for negotiation. It may also serve as a vehicle for advancing the current Mexican government’s economic reform agenda. The leaders of the U.S. and Mexico believe that the TPP will bolster domestic economic growth.

North America is emerging as a virtual supply center of the international energy market, a development that has implications for the economic and geopolitical stature of the entire continent.

This issue brief explores China’s deepening relationship with Costa Rica, which severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 2007 to strengthen its economic ties with the PRC. China’s relationship with Costa Rica has opened the possibility for the PRC to reach out to other countries in the region.

The BRICS clearly want something tangible to demonstrate their global prominence and the power of non-Western values. Russell Green examines the critical issues that must be resolved before the BRICS bank can open its doors.

This issue brief proposes a framework for awarding bids in a public tender for exploration blocks. The context for the proposal is Mexico’s energy reform of 2013-2014.

This issue brief identifies the four main reforms that the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government must undertake to revive the manufacturing industry in India.

Speaking from the historic steps of Old North on the Georgetown University campus on June 25, 2013, President Obama unveiled a detailed plan to address the causes and impacts of climate change. In his words, the president promised, “I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants, and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants.” Not quite a year later on June 6, 2014, Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, responded by proposing “state-specific rate-based goals for carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector, as well as guidelines for states to follow in developing plans to achieve the state-specific goals.”

Talk of a “pivot to Asia” that supposedly would mark President Obama’s second term is “misplaced and even simplistic,” writes fellow Kristian Coates Ulrichsen. In a globalized world, “key U.S. relationships with strategic and commercial partners … cannot be addressed in isolation from one another. The convergence of U.S. ties and Asian ties with the Middle East is a case in point highlights how regions and issues are interconnected as never before.”

The violent struggle between rival Mexican drug cartels and other criminal groups has left tens of thousands dead and towns across Mexico paralyzed with fear. With overwhelmed police forces relatively powerless to control drug-related murders and kidnappings, a growing number of vigilante organizations, or self-defense groups, aim to restore order — but now even they are fighting, and killing, among themselves.