All Contributions
Understanding the Logic and Impact of Chinese Direct Investments in the Developing World
When companies or individuals make investments in a business in another country, experts call this “foreign direct investment.” Today, China is the fastest growing source of such investments. From the early 1990s to 2015, Chinese and Hong Kong’s foreign direct investments increased from a few hundred million to $2.5 trillion...
How to Improve International Investment Law
International law is in a rough period. Since 2016 institutions as varied as the European Court of Human Rights, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Court have been harshly criticized by politicians chafing at their strictures. The reasons for growing dissatisfaction vary. Africans unhappy with human rights prosecutions...
How Patronage-Oriented Party Systems Weaken Democratic Government and Distort Economic Growth
Many citizens in Europe and the United States believe that the quality of democracy has declined over the last few decades. Political cartelization and patronage-oriented styles of governance can help explain how parties collude to survive as public debates narrow and the grassroots bases of parties wither. Global development ties...
How U.S. Schools are Affected by Undocumented Immigrant Dreamers and Deferred Action Recipients
As of the middle of 2018, Congress still has not provided any legislative response to President Trump’s rescinding of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program – the Obama-era executive action called “DACA” for short that provided relief from deportation to approximately 800,000 migrants that grew-up in the United States...
How to Protect Undocumented School Children and Their Families in a Time of Stepped-Up Immigration Enforcement
In a May 2018 Congressional hearing, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was asked whether a public school principal or teacher who finds out that a child or his family members are undocumented immigrants has a responsibility to make a report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement – called ICE for short. Secretary...
Understanding Protests, Repression, and the Need for a Revival of Democracy in Nicaragua
Starting in late April of 2018, the small Central American country Nicaragua entered the media spotlight as massive street protests rocked the decade-long authoritarian regime of President Daniel Ortega. Brutal government repression has killed over 200 and led to intensified calls for Ortega to step down. Although nobody could have...
The Untold Migration Story - How Improved Policies Can Benefit Both Receiving and Sending Societies
From the U.S. travel ban to the rise of anti-immigrant populists in Europe, politicians often decry migration in times of moral and economic crisis. Controversies can easily preclude a balanced understanding of what migration means – not only for immigrants and their new societies, but also for the places migrants...
The Canada-U.S. Relationship in the the Time of "America First"
Few ties are as essential to the United States and Canada as the relationship they enjoy with one another. John F. Kennedy’s words to the Parliament in Ottawa on May 17, 1961 still ring true. “Geography has made us neighbors,” he said. “History has made us friends. Economics has made...
How U.S. Presidents Can Inspire Economic Innovations That Benefit Everyone
What can a U.S. president do to build a next-generation economy and widen opportunities for all Americans, not just a privileged few? Every modern American president has wrestled with some version of these questions. History provides powerful lessons and debunks popular misconceptions about where innovations come from. From the cotton...
Lessons from the Incarceration and Forced Labor of Japanese Americans During World War II
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans – two-thirds of them U.S.-born full citizens – were forcibly removed from their West Coast homes and sent to prison work camps across the country. The government called this process “internment” or “relocation” and labeled the prison...