ABSTRACT: : This paper examines the potential of the two frontrunners—the United States and China—for long-run AI leadership. It develops a simple model of sustained innovation in information technologies, arguing that long-run progress hinges on “governed Schumpeterian competition”: strong but constrained state capacity combined with Schumpeterian entrepreneurship that sustains creative destruction. Using the historical experience of the printing press—an early information technology with disruptive features analogous to AI—the paper shows how different institutional endowments shape the trajectory of these technologies. In imperial China, competition was initially imported via Buddhism but was later absorbed into a centralized, stability-first order, while in fragmented Western Europe, low exit costs and competition allowed printing to evolve. The analysis then applies this lens to AI, comparing the political economy of the U.S. and China to examine how each system structurally approaches AI development and innovation. While the U.S. still leads, China’s model constitutes a major institutional innovation, combining a state-capitalist system with Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. Although it remains unclear whether it has solved the autocrats’ dilemma between stability and creative destruction, China could be capable of competing with the U.S. in AI over the long run.

ABSTRACT: Trade is both an economic and a strategic instrument. Symmetric interdependence and rough power parity draw it toward its economic dimension and lower escalation risk; by contrast, asymmetric interdependence and power imbalances pull it toward a strategic role, raising that risk by lowering the costs and increasing the expected returns of coercion. Geopolitical competition also reinforces the strategic role of trade. A particular configuration of such rivalry arises when a hegemon is challenged by a rising power, prompting both sides to hedge against interdependence. This paper terms this dynamic the “Trade Thucydides Trap”; after eight decades of Pax Americana, its preconditions are present in today’s U.S–China competition. To study the strategic deployment of trade, this paper reviews fourteen great-power trade conflicts (17th century–1980s), about half of which escalated into open conflict, and then focuses on the eight cases most analogous to the contemporary U.S.–China competition. Translating history into assessment, the paper builds a U.S.–China scorecard and introduces a Strategic Leverage Ratio. Results show broad bilateral parity, and that U.S. leverage peaked in the mid-1990s and has declined since, implying limited coercive capacity over Beijing.

ABSTRACT: Are there structural determinants of the dynamics of military hegemony? Integrating insights from political economy and innovation economics and drawing on comparative historical case studies of past military hegemons, this paper defines the “Hegemon’s Dilemma” as the institutional challenge of reconciling two principal channels. On the one hand, hegemonic scale allows for lower unit costs, rapid scaling and integration, surge and preemption capacity, and positive network effects. On the other hand, it can foster incumbent sclerosis and incentive asymmetry vis-à-vis challengers: incumbents dominating the prevailing paradigm face lower expected returns and higher risks from disruptive change, while organizational inertia and entrenched coalitions built around yesterday’s winning recipes make meaningful course corrections costlier for the hegemon. Because warfare unfolds in recurring threat–counter-threat cycles where each advance summons a countermeasure, the answer to the Dilemma is to sustain a balance that allows the hegemon to learn and field new capabilities at or ahead of the cycle’s tempo while preserving organizational coherence and scale. 

This research note addresses that question through an examination of the situation today: how do green jobs compare in terms of job quality, both relative to brown jobs and between different types of green jobs, in countries and in sectors? This question, at the intersection between two major recent socio-economic initiatives – the European Green Deal and the European Pillar of Social Rights (also referred to as the (European) Social Pillar henceforth) – is a central preoccupation for many Europeans and their governments, precisely because of the possible distributive consequences associated with a green transition. Our field of study in this research note follows directly from the dimensions of quality of employment as defined by Eurofound: socio-economic security, education and training, working conditions and representation, and work-life and gender balance. All these dimensions are also covered in the 20 principles of the European Pillar of Social Rights.