Governments are increasingly seeking to control the behaviour of technology and firms that are pushing the innovation frontier. What is this new wave of controlling tech aiming for? Can regulation and antitrust action increase the contestability of markets – and how? What are the costs and benefits of reducing the market power of Big Tech?

In this episode, Fredrik Erixon and Sam Bowman have a conversation about the new wave of digital regulation in the EU and the US.

Sam Bowman is the Director of Competition Policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, a think tank based in the United States and a prolific writer on matters of competition and technology. Before joining ICLE in 2020, he was a Principal at Fingleton, a London-based regulatory and competition advisory firm, where he advised corporate clients on competition and public policy issues and led industry reviews into Open Banking and open data in the energy market. Before that, he was Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute.

This episode was recorded as a live webinar. Click here to watch this conversation on YouTube.

Cyberattacks are growing – and they come with huge costs to the economy and security. This summer alone, there were cyberattacks in the West bringing down pipelines, healthcare systems, payment processors and others – sometimes leading to a complete standstill in the production. How can societies defend against these cyberattacks?

In this episode, Fredrik Erixon and Elisabeth Braw have a conversation about her latest book on gray-zone aggression.

Elisabeth Braw is a writer and security expert – and author of The Defender’s Dilemma. She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on defense against emerging security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats. She is a columnist with Foreign Policy, where she writes on national security and the globalized economy, and a member of the National Preparedness Commission (UK).

This episode was recorded as a live webinar. Click here to watch this conversation on YouTube.

Tax havens, transfer pricing, digitalisation, what do these terms all mean and how are they related to one another? With the rise of multinational companies and their activities spreading all across the world, it has become unclear who should tax these companies and how.

In this episode, Erik van der Marel and Mathieu Parenti have a conversation about international corporate taxation.

Mathieu Parenti is a professor of Economics for the Solvay Business School at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is also a reseach fellow at ECARES and CEPR and an associate editor at the Economic Journal. He received his Ph.D. in economics at the Paris School of Economics in 2012. His research interests include Trade Policy and Industrial Organisation.

While China has managed a fast economic recovery after the pandemic, Beijing has laid out plans for its future economic policies that signal an inward turn. For instance, the Fourteenth Five-year Plan talks about a new model of ‘dual circulation’, which means that the country will reduce its reliance on foreign markets. But are inward-looking policies economically viable for China – a country that has prospered greatly on the back of structural economic reforms that gradually opened the country up to foreign competition? What is China trying to achieve with policies that seem to encourage self-sufficiency?

In this episode Fredrik Erixon and Joerg Wuttke have a conversation about the direction of China’s market-access policy.

Joerg Wuttke is a leading expert on China who frequently appears in international media. He is the President of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China – an organization of 1,700 member companies that recently released its annual flagship paper on China’s economic policies and market-access problems that are confronting European companies.

This episode was recorded as a live webinar. Click here to watch this conversation on YouTube.

Few books have had such an influence as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man from 1992: it profoundly shaped the way that many people in the West thought about the period that would follow the collapse of communism. But how should we think about current developments in the world – now that liberal triumphalism is buried, and the norms of liberal democracy are being challenged both at home and abroad? And what does Francis Fukuyama think about our current age – and his past prophecies? In her new book, which builds on a series of conversations with Fukuyama, Mathilde Fasting discusses issues like the quest for identity politics and what can make liberal democracy to thrive again.

In this episode, Fredrik Erixon and Mathilde Fasting have a conversation about her latest book.

Dr. Mathilde Fasting is an economist and economic historian who is a fellow at the Norwegian think tank Civita. She is the author of After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama (Georgetown University Press, 2021).

This episode was recorded as a live webinar. Click here to watch this conversation on YouTube.