The Role of Policy in Achieving Shared, Sustainable Economic Prosperity

No trade deal can dictate our relationship with China. Lawrence Summers, February 4, 2019, Opinion, “Lawrence Summers is a professor at and past president of Harvard University. He was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. As the United States and China continue to joust over trade and technology, the U.S. policy debate contrasts two views of the primary problem.” Link

There Is No Sino-American Trade War. Martin Feldstein, January 29, 2019, Opinion, “Chinese negotiators recently offered to buy enough American products to reduce the bilateral trade deficit to zero by 2024. Why, then, have US negotiators rejected that as a way to end the dispute?” Link

Harvard’s Rogoff explains why China has become a ‘problem place’. Kenneth Rogoff, January 22, 2019, Video, “Kenneth Rogoff, public policy and economics professor at Harvard, thinks China is becoming a real problem. “If we want to talk about a problem place, it’s China. It’s clearly China,” Rogoff told Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There’s a slowdown going on in China that’s not demand driven. It’s a slowdown coming from the fact that they’re having a productivity slowdown.” ” Link

Trump’s Trade Game. Dani Rodrik, January 16, 2019, Opinion, “In 2018, US President Donald Trump finally followed through on his “America first” trade strategy. Yet it is already clear that his policies will have little impact on trade growth, and even less effect on China’s behavior.” Link

There Is “Significant Risk” Of Recession. Lawrence Summers, January 10, 2019, Video, “There is “significant risk” of a recession in the next two years, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers repeated yesterday on Bloomberg TV. Summers, now an economist at Harvard University, focused his comments on China’s economy, which he warned was “seeing as difficult a moment… as any they’ve had in the last 10 or 20 years.” ” Link

Snake-Oil Economics. N. Gregory Mankiw, 2019, Paper, “A study by Robert Barro (a conservative economist at Harvard) and Furman (a liberal economist at Harvard) published in 2018 estimates that the tax bill will increase annual growth by 0.13 percent- age points over a decade…” Link

The Shutdown Could Disrupt The U.S. Economy In A Big Way. Nancy Koehn, January 8, 2019, Audio, “Will the government shutdown have a long-term impact on the U.S. economy? Nancy Koehn, professor at the Harvard Business School, said that the shutdown could disrupt the economy on both a micro and macro level. “What’s interesting to me as someone who has done a lot of economic work is how we’re beginning to see the cascading consequences,” she said on Boston Public Radio Tuesday. There are individual pains — like farmers not being able to get loans or aid to help cope with the U.S.-China trade war.” Link

China’s Malign Secrecy. Ricardo Hausmann, January 2, 2019, Opinion, “In principle, China’s massive savings, infrastructure know-how, and willingness to lend could be great for developing economies. Alas, as many countries have learned the hard way, Chinese development finance often delivers a corruption-filled sugar high to the economy, followed by a nasty financial (and sometimes political) hangover.” Link

Tariffs Should Target Chinese Lawlessness, Not the Trade Deficit. Martin Feldstein, December 27, 2018, Opinion, “Made in China 2025 is Beijing’s plan to dominate global markets in a wide range of high-tech products. China’s strategy is to give large government subsidies to state-owned companies and supplement their research with technology stolen from American and other Western companies. This theft includes using the internet to invade the computers of foreign firms and forbidding companies to do business in China unless they share their technology with Chinese firms.” Link

Can anything hold back China’s economy? Lawrence Summers, December 3, 2018, Opinion, “Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping reached an agreement over the weekend at the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina on a framework for trade dialogue that will delay the imposition of new U.S. tariffs. While surely better than the alternative, this step does not address any of the fundamental tensions in the economic relationship between the United States and China.” Link