A recent 60 Minutes segment gave the Cato Institute a platform to argue that America’s shipbuilding crisis proves protectionist industrial policy has failed. The opposite is true: the crisis is the product of four decades without an industrial policy.
A new Federal Reserve FEDS Note finds a systematic link between Chinese industrial policy interventions and export growth. The 15 most policy-targeted sectors accounted for 76% of the increase in China’s aggregate trade surplus from 2017 to 2024.
The report finds that China has consolidated global dominance in the midstream stages of battery supply chains—refining and chemical conversion—giving the Chinese Communist Party significant influence over pricing, supply availability, and industrial investment.
To reduce the deficit in a durable way, the United States must do more than tariff goods. It must tariff the money.
The development of GTAP-USL economic model marks another step forward in our efforts to make the GTAP more realistic and a better predictor of the real-world effects of trade policies or trade shocks. It’s critical to build models that provide a better understanding of how policies impact people, families, racial groups, gender, cities and regions. There is still more work to be done.
China’s trade surplus has crossed a dangerous threshold. In 2025, it exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, surpassing the previous record of $993 billion.
U.S. drugmakers are rapidly shifting the front end of America’s pharmaceutical ecosystem (e.g. discovery, early-stage-development, and the IP engine) to China through a surge of licensing deals and cross-border partnerships.
The United States is facing a new form of strategic dependence: Chinese-linked firms are reentering critical American industries through influence and control rather than visible ownership.
The current cost-of-living crisis – defined by the soaring cost of essential services – is not the result of excessive consumer demand or short-term inflation shocks. It is the product of decades of trade and industrial policy choices that weakened middle-class wage growth.
CPA’s submission, “Ensuring U.S. Sovereignty in North American Trade,” concludes that the current trilateral USMCA framework binds two vastly different economies to one unenforceable system—with each reliant on the far larger U.S. consumer market.
