Archive

LEPC VII will bring together leading thinkers, practitioners, and policymakers to analyze the drivers behind this sub national success, and to chart actionable pathways for the future. Each session outlined explores a foundational dimension of India’s growth story, with attention to both policy diagnosis and on-the-ground innovation.

Europe’s revamped fiscal rules promise discipline and stability, but Italy’s numbers tell a different story. Once realistic multipliers and hysteresis are built in, consolidation pushes debt up, growth down, and recessionary pressure outwards across the eurozone, hardly a recipe for sustainability.

A Global History

Investigations into the possible effects of the fiscal consolidations required under the new European fiscal rules on Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio find that the new governance framework may lead to the pro-cyclical tightening, weaker growth and adverse debt dynamics that characterized earlier phases of EU fiscal governance

AI was sold as a tool to broaden the marketplace of ideas. Instead, a handful of platforms now control how truth travels, shaping what we see, starving journalism, and locking new AI rivals out of the data democracy needs to survive.

Venture-backed “tech capital” is reshaping U.S. politics through campaign finance, platform gatekeeping, defense/AI procurement, and policy entrepreneurship. In an interview with Nick French, INET’s Research Director Thomas Ferguson discusses these channels of influence, examining their macro-distributional consequences, and outlining guardrails to restore democratic accountability and broadly shared gains.

Since 2007, recurring food-price spikes reveal hunger as a problem of market design and underinvestment, not scarcity. With Brazil’s COP30 on the horizon, aligning climate commitments with food systems could cement policy space to manage markets and advance the right to food.

Elon Musk secured shareholder approval for a new stock-based package designed to double his voting power at Tesla, potentially making him the first trillion-dollar employee. As this plan cements Musk’s control it ties vesting to audacious market-cap and production targets and diverts focus from progressive value creation. Musk’s governance, layoffs, and politicization could imperil Tesla’s EV leadership and ambitions in AI and robotics.

As the government shutdown drags on, official economic data has slowed to a crawl, leaving policymakers, markets, and citizens increasingly reliant on private-sector numbers. That’s a problem.

The soaring costs of city life appear to be sending urban voters toward progressive leaders who promise relief, both in the U.S. and globally.

How can history help us understand the world economists study—and change how we confront the climate crisis?

The LEPC is a flagship initiative, designed to bring together leading voices in Law, Economics, and Public Policy to engage with complex, real-world challenges in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary manner.

The argument that free trade is always the correct policy is based on a flawed welfare analysis. Free trade results in winners and losers and economists are not competent to analyze the impact on well-being as a whole or the spillover social consequences of the discontent of the losers.

From political slugfests to classroom battles, historian Marc Egnal talks with INET’s Lynn Parramore about the need for a new approach to our national story.

The richest Americans control $46 trillion in wealth—but many pay little or no federal tax.