February 6, 2025

Interviews

Recycled Liberalism

An interview with Marta Castilho on the EU–Mercosur trade agreement

Since 1999, the European Union (EU) and Mercosur have been negotiating a bi-regional partnership agreement comprising three pillars: trade, cooperation, and political dialogue. A quarter century later, in December 2024, the parties announced the conclusion of negotiations during the Mercosur Summit in Montevideo, attended by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Before implementation, the…

Longform

February 5, 2025

Analysis

After the Diamond Rush

South Africa and the internationalization of mineral extraction

For over 150 years, mining has constituted a core feature of the South African economy. The seemingly inexhaustible bounty of the earth made the country the wealthiest in the continent and financed one of the most all-encompassing systems of racial…

January 30, 2025

Analysis

State and Development

Brazil’s biggest trading partner impedes its investment capacity

The world economy has seen a resurgence of industrial policy in recent decades. National development programs are at the center of a variety of polarizing geopolitical axes: carbon emissions, world manufacturing shares, and integration into rival trade and investment blocs.…

January 30, 2025

Analysis

After Antitrust

The recent priority on antitrust enforcement obscures more direct solutions to wealth inequality: taxation and regulation.

During the 1950s and 1960s, 35 percent of workers were unionized, 25 percent of the economy by GDP was price regulated, the corporate tax rate was 53 percent, and the top marginal income tax rate was 94 percent. Inequality fell…

January 25, 2025

Interviews

Decolonizing Jamaica

An interview with Professor Anthony Bogues on Michael Manley’s centenary

The ideas of the Jamaican political leader Michael Manley had a global impact that continues to be felt today. As the leader of the People’s National Party (PNP) from 1969 to 1992, and particularly in his first period as prime…

January 16, 2025

Analysis

Developmental Tracks

American railroad regulation as industrial policy

Recent years have seen an astonishing resurgence of industrial policy as a legislative agenda and topic for lively debate. Thanks in large part to the waning political fortunes of neoliberalism, deliberate efforts by governments to shape the economic trajectories of…

January 16, 2025

Analysis

Adverse Terrain

Brazil’s experiments in labor law

The 2017 reform of Brazil’s labor law is part of a broader movement that arose over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, with the purpose of eroding labor rights on an international…

January 8, 2025

Analysis

Selling Power

The design of energy finance, from the New Deal to the IRA

A comparison of the New Deal power program and the IRA exposes key design questions regarding the financing of power systems.

December 27, 2024

Analysis

Brave New World

A third industrial divide?

Endogenous dynamics have crippled the current growth wave that began in the 1980s—yielding the period of decay in which we are now living. Rather than achieving a new stability of horizontal competition, the turn toward the market brought about a…

December 18, 2024

Analysis

Structural Dependence

Austerity and authoritarianism in Pakistan

In November 2024, demonstrators from various cities of Pakistan defied lockdowns to gather in Islamabad and demand that Imran Khan, former Prime Minister, be released immediately from jail. Khan, incarcerated since the summer of 2023, has been charged with a…

December 13, 2024

Interviews

Normalization and the Future of the Middle East

An interview with Elham Fakhro on the Abraham Accords

Before October 7, 2023, the pursuit of diplomatic and economic normalization between Israel and Arab states appeared to be the central trajectory for regional politics in the Middle East. With the prospect of an Iran deal buried, this path represented…

Shortform

February 6, 2025

Analysis

Slashing the State

Argentina under Milei’s chainsaw

Unlike on economic issues, where Milei’s agenda made swift concessions to macrismo, his cultural and ideological crusade only escalated once in power.

January 31, 2025

Analysis

Polycrisis 2025

Diplomacy, finance, and extraction in the year ahead

The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years. The first month of 2025 has set the scene. Events so far have included imperial gangsterism against both a poor Latin American country (Colombia)…

December 18, 2024

Analysis

Transfer and Transition

Technology transfer and green industrial transformation

Over the past years of escalating trade disputes between China and the US, the latter has repeatedly highlighted a practice it considers anathema: technology transfers that US companies need to offer to their Chinese collaborators if they want to do…

December 18, 2024

Analysis

America First?

Escalation and reverberations in the trade war

The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in…

October 16, 2024

Analysis

Breaking Up Google

Antitrust, competition, and the intricacies of monopoly

In late August, Judge Amit P. Mehta of US District Court for the District of Columbia found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online search. Google had paid billions to device manufacturers and browser developers—including Apple, Samsung and…

October 11, 2024

Analysis

Marshall Plans

New green industrial diplomacy?

At September’s UN General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s President Lula described the international financial system as a “Marshall Plan in reverse” in which the poorest countries finance the richest. Driving the point home, Lula thundered, “African countries borrow at…

October 9, 2024

Analysis

Adaptation in the Sanctioned Economy

Domestic manufacturing, overcapacity, and the limits of Iran’s economic resilience

The oil boom of the late 2000s created significant headwinds for Iranian manufacturers. As the value of oil exports surged, the Iranian rial appreciated, real wages rose, and foreign goods flooded the Iranian market. Middle-class families relished in their newfound…

September 4, 2024

Analysis

Labor’s Gains?

What do large-unit elections tell us about the state of the American labor movement?

In 2023, a “banner year” for labor in many regards, only 115,551 workers voted in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections, out of roughly 160 million workers in the United States labor force. In FY 2018, that number was…

August 30, 2024

Analysis

The Contest to Shape “Country Platforms”

IMF reforms and Bangladesh’s revolt

Last month, young people in Bangladesh revolted against their government over a jobs quota bill that would have reserved 30 percent of public-sector jobs for family members of veterans of the 1971 war with Pakistan. Protestors did manage to drive…

August 15, 2024

Reviews

Who Benefits From Sanctions?

On “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare” by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez

Sanctions against Iran amount to some of the harshest and longest-running restrictions in the world. Dating back to the 1979 revolution that overthrew one of America’s closest allies in the region, early sanctions imposed primarily by the US froze Iranian…

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Series are collections of works published by Phenomenal World on a single subject or area of research. Series are commissioned to analyze particular issues or historical moments, and are either ongoing projects or collected as one-time volumes.

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