Dollar & Sense: The Brookings Trade Podcast

From technology competition to the global rise of illiberalism, the United States will face numerous foreign policy challenges in the year ahead. John R. Allen, a retired U.S. Marine Corps four-star general and president of the Brookings Institution, joins David Dollar to discuss those challenges and how the new administration can work with America’s allies to meet them.

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Carbon pricing systems have been celebrated as instruments for combatting climate change, but how effective are they really? David Victor, co-chair of the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate, joins David Dollar to explain why market-based solutions for addressing climate change have fallen short of their promise. Victor examines how politics have hampered the effectiveness of market policies in key sectors, like transportation and aviation, and the political barriers the Biden administration will need to overcome in order to make real progress on climate change.

President-elect Biden will face a myriad of economic challenges when he is inaugurated next month, including a pandemic that continues to spread and unemployment numbers that remain high. Jason Furman joins David Dollar to discuss how this crisis differs from the economic issues Biden faced in 2009, what should be prioritized in a short-term stimulus package and long-term reforms, and to what extent policymakers should worry about the federal debt when designing fiscal relief.

When the COVID-19 pandemic sent the global economy into a deep recession, it exposed structural weaknesses in economic institutions and highlighted the need for reform. The challenges countries face today are daunting, but this moment should be recognized as an opportunity to build back more sustainable and inclusive economies. David Dollar is joined by three Brookings experts—Eswar Prasad, Marcela Escobari, and Zia Qureshi—to discuss their forward-looking policy proposals for a post-COVID-19 world.

This week, 15 countries in Asia and the Pacific joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which is arguably the largest free trade agreement in history. To explain the origins of the agreement and how it will affect economic integration across Asia, David Dollar is joined by Peter Petri, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and professor of International Finance at the Brandeis International Business School.