International Economic Governance

This program draws together Nunn School research and outreach focused on how economic policies and economic power affect people’s lives. Its focus is on the interface between the global economy and territorially-bound jurisdictions. Thus, it is concerned with the ability of governments to discipline economic forces to the benefit of their citizens; whether and how governments can use economic tools to achieve foreign policy and domestic objectives; and whose interests shape these policies. The program currently has several clusters of projects examining these issues:

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Commercial Diplomacy, Economic Statecraft, and Economic Security

Since the late 2010s, there has been a dramatic rise in governments engaging in economic statecraft, the use of economic tools to achieve geopolitical ends. Associated with this development there has also been growing attention to economic security, how to mitigate the effects of economic coercion. At the same time, governments have continued to seek to advance their country’s economic interests through commercial diplomacy.

Related Projects

Dalton Lin — China’s Economic Statecraft

China has used policy tools short of force to achieve its international goals, the most significant of which is Beijing’s economic statecraft. However, China’s foreign economic initiatives, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, interact with target states’ agency to shape international outcomes and enlighten appropriate US responses.

Associated Outputs

  • Dalton Lin, China’s Belt and Road Initiative in World Politics, ongoing book project with Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Geopolitics and China’s Patronage Strategy: The Wary Patron, the Autonomous Client, and the Vietnam War (London; New York: Routledge, 2025)
  • Dalton Lin, “China’s Measures and Countermeasures to Economic Coercion,” invited talk given at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea, July 18, 2024
  • Dalton Lin, “The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s Pursuit of Agenda-Setting Power,” Orbis 67(4): 496-523, September 2023.
  • Dalton Lin, “United States-China Economic Competition in the Global South,” panel discussion arranged by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, US. September 26, 2023
M.E. Kosal – Growing the Economy: Differences in the US and China’s Biomanufacturing Sectors

The bioeconomy and biomanufacturing, such as that employing synthetic biology and other biotech advances, is an emerging sector that has been heralded as the source of transformational capabilities, including for military and defense applications. This work leverages theoretical models from comparative political economy (Hsueh, 2015 & 2025) to understand the US and PRC’s bioeconomy and biomanufacturing sectors and to explain differences in policy and technocratic decision-making versus traditional defense manufacturing research and development. Sectoral structural attributes, sectoral organization of institutions, and the perceived national security strategic value of sectors will be examined. This work also has surveyed existing safety and security governance approaches to synthetic biology globally.

Associated Outputs

Alasdair Young — The EU’s Economic Statecraft

Economic statecraft should be particularly important to the EU because it lacks the capacity to project military power and its capacity to wield its large market as a power resource is greater than in aspects of foreign policy.  The existing literature, however, suffers from three shortcomings.  First, there is no literature on the EU’s economic statecraft.  Rather, the literature on the EU as a global actor is fragmented among those who study the EU’s foreign, trade, enlargement and development policies.  Second, recent trade policy literature focuses on “geoeconomics,” which encompasses a wide range of policies adopted for diverse reasons and largely ignores those that are conventionally considered elements of economic statecraft.  Third, the existing literature on the EU’s foreign economic policies tends to focus on what the EU does rather than what it achieves.  This project aims to develop a comprehensive, yet focused assessment of the EU’s ability to wield its economic capacity for foreign policy ends.

Associated Outputs

  • “Trade Policy: The rise of geoeconomics” in H. Wallace, M. A. Pollack, and A. R. Young (eds), Policy-Making in the European Union, 9th edition, Oxford University Press, 2025
  • “Adapting to Adversity? EU Trade Policy in a Geopolitical World,” Contemporary European Politics (in production)

Regulating the Economy

Economic activity increasingly occurs across borders. This raises questions about how territorially bounded jurisdictions can (individually or cooperatively) regulate these activities. A cluster of projects seek to answer these questions.

Related Projects

Vicki Birchfield — Will There Be a Transatlantic Approach to Governing Artificial Intelligence?

The transformative nature and accelerating pace of development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have generated frenzied political debate and urgent calls for regulation. The European Union’s (EU) AI Act is one of the earliest, most ambitious, legally binding efforts to regulate high-risk AI systems. This article argues that the thrust of the EU’s focus on ‘ethical and secure’ AI and its first-mover regulatory status have helped to foster transatlantic cooperation on AI governance. To probe this assertion, the article analyzes the ethical underpinnings and key provisions of the AI Act and compares them to policy developments in the United States. The analysis provides preliminary evidence of policy similarities across the Atlantic from an alignment of ethical concerns to a shared understanding of the risks and associated need for common guidelines and standards in the AI sector. Tracing agreements within the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) suggests further cooperation and relative congruence in the EU and US approaches to AI.

Associated Outputs

Potz-Nielsen – Regulatory Governance and Technology

Innovation is widely seen as a key benefit of market competition. Yet, most research on the link between competition and innovation—especially in economics—overlooks the role of politics and public policy, particularly antitrust law and its enforcement. This project identifies four mechanisms through which competition policy may foster innovation, even when it fails to increase competition itself. It argues that the effectiveness of such policy depends on the quality of the institutions that enforce them.

Associated Outputs

  • Working Paper: “How Many Lawyers Does It Take to Turn on a Lightbulb? Innovation, Antitrust/Competition Law, and Judicial Independence” (with Tim Büthe and Cindy Cheng) presented at the Swiss Political Science Association (SPSA) Annual Congress (Mar 2024)
Alasdair Young — Governing the Digital Economy

Digital technologies bring many economic and social benefits, but they also create new risks and exacerbate existing ones. It has become common to identify three approaches to regulating the risks associated with the digital economy, each embodied by one of the world’s three largest economies. The United States is depicted as deferring to the market. In China regulation enhances the power of the government. The EU regulates the digital economy in the interests of individuals. These different priorities are typically presented as rooted in distinctive and fundamental differences about the appropriate relationship between the state and market. Moreover, these different regulatory approaches are portrayed as both threatening to cause the fragmentation of the global digital economy and being the basis of competition and conflict among the regulatory great powers. This project challenges this emerging conventional wisdom. First, it argues that transatlantic regulatory differences have been rooted in politics rather than principled differences. Second, rather than rule differences and jurisdictional conflict being virtually synonymous, transatlantic differences in approaches to governing the digital economy almost never led to conflict and, even then, cooperation was preferred.

Associated Outputs

  • Young, A.R. (2024), “Governing the Digital Economy: Transatlantic Accommodation and Cooperation” Journal of European Integration, 46/7: 973-992.
  • Young, A.R. (2024), “Triumph in Taxing Times? Linked Transatlantic Two-Level Games and the Taxation of the Digital Economy”, Journal of European Integration,46/7, 2024: 1015-1034.
Potz-Nielsen – Governing Capital Flows

Individuals that have lost jobs or experienced changes in their cost of living often blame governments for allowing international flows of goods, services, people, and money to overwhelm domestic markets. However, the expansion of markets beyond national borders makes them hard to limit; the ease with which these international flows move through a country means that governments may not be able to control them. The question at the center of this project is how much governments actually have a choice in opening their market to these different international flows. It considers one specific group of policies that governments can use to restrict the flow of investment or money through a country: capital controls. This project finds that there is evidence that constituents have distinct preferences over how governments restrict the flow of money and investment. And, that these preferences inform the way governments choose to target these flows in addition to whether they target them. This suggests that the use of capital controls is not simply driven by the norm of unrestricted markets pushed by international businesses and institutions alike. Governments are instead choosing carefully when and how to limit their markets, which means that they can influence who wins or loses in the context of the global market.

Associated Outputs

  • “Work of Wages: Capital Controls in the Real Economy” presented at the European Political Science Association (EPSA) Annual Meeting (July 2024)
  • “Remittance Flows an Approval of Governments” (with Rayan Sayour and Tim Büthe)
  • “Choosing Capital Controls: Constituent Preferences over Restricting Financial Flows”
  • “Signaling the Private Sector: Compliance with Anti-Money Laundering Regulation” presented at the European Political Science Association (EPSA) Annual Meeting (July 2025)
Vicki Birchfield — Biodiversity and the Digital Transformation in the 21st Century

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the “commodity fiction” of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry.

Associated Outputs

  • “Biodiversity and the Digital Transformation: Rethinking Private Property and Global Governance in the Twenty-first Century, with Raisa Mulatinho Simoes *first author, Environmental Ethics, Volume 46:1, Spring 2024.

Trade Policy

The era of globalization was driven by the proliferation of transnational production manifest through foreign direct investment and global value chains. This development was enable by the trend towards ever more liberal trade and investment regimes. That process has been thrown into doubt (if not reverse) by greater concerns about the vulnerability of transnational production in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the geopolitiziation of trade. A cluster of projects explores the changing nature of trade.

Related Projects

Alasdair Young — Transatlantic Economic Relations in the Age of Trump

The transatlantic economic relationship is the most valuable intercontinental relationship in the world. It is also uniquely interpenetrated with European and American firms extensively invested in the other market. The transatlantic economic relationship has historically been punctuated by periodic, sometimes intense, trade disputes. These disputes, however, were narrowly focused and left the vast bulk of the transatlantic economic relationship untouched. Geopolitical and other considerations helped to restrain these disputes. The Trump administration has taken a much broader and more aggressive approach. The US and EU have concluded a fragile agreement that restricts EU exports more than they were but less than was threatened. This project examines how the EU is managing its new, more fraught economic relationship with the US.

Associated Outputs

  • Young, A.R. “From Trade Skirmishes to Trade War? Transatlantic Trade Relations During Trump II” paper for the European Center for Populism Studies project on Populism and transatlantic relations during the Trump administration.
Alasdair Young, Vicky Birchfield, and Carly Potz-Nielsen – Transatlantic Network for Dialogue, Education and Multidisciplinary Research (TANDEM)

This Jean Monnet Policy Debate funded under the European Union’s ERASMUS+ Programme connects 18 higher education institutions from Europe (6), the United States (7), and Canada (5) with the shared objective of fostering a broad and informed dialogue on transatlantic relations. Coordinated by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) the network aims to collect, evaluate, debate, and disseminate innovative research and educational materials, enabling partners to strengthen their research and teaching agendas while engaging key stakeholders in well-founded discussions on EU-North America relations.

Other Partners

  • Europe: Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internationales (Spain), Freie Univeritaet Berlin (Germany), Univeritetet Oslo (Norway), Uniwersytet, Jagiellonski (Poland), Vilniaus Universitetas (Lithuania)
  • US: American University, Viginia Tech, University of Florida, University of Illinois, Boston University, Pennsylvania State University
  • Canada: Carleton University, University of Victoria, University of Tornoto, Univerité de Montreal, York University
Potz-Nielsen — Trade and FDI

Trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) are often treated as distinct channels of global economic integration, but their interaction can reveal much about domestic political preferences. While conventional wisdom suggests that capital uniformly favors openness and labor uniformly resists it, preferences over trade and capital controls are more nuanced. This project explores how the relationship between trade and FDI flows shapes constituent attitudes toward globalization. This project argues that when trade and FDI move together – suggesting a reinforcing pattern of economic openness – labor is more likely to support restrictions on both. When they diverge, preferences become more fragmented, with constituencies responding differently to each type of flow. This suggests that the structure and alignment of international economic flows plays a critical role in shaping how domestic actors perceive and engage with global markets. Understanding this relationship helps explain why support for globalization varies not only across countries but also within them over time.

Associated Outputs

  • “Complements or Substitutes? The Dynamic Relationship between FDI and Trade.” presented as part of the International Political Economy Seminar at the Hoschüle für Politk, TUM.

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