WITA Webinar: U.S. Industrial Policy, Subsidies, and Trade

Edward Alden is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Ross Distinguished Visiting Professor at Western Washington University, specializing in U.S. economic competitiveness, trade, and immigration policy. He is the author of the book Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind  in the Global Economy, which focuses on the federal government’s failure to respond effectively to competitive challenges on issues such as trade, currency, worker retraining, education, and infrastructure.

Alden recently served as the project director of a CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force, co-chaired by former Michigan Governor John Engler and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, which produced the report The Work Ahead: Machines, Skills, and U.S. Leadership in the Twenty-First Century. In 2011, he was the project codirector of the Independent Task Force that produced U.S. Trade and Investment Policy. In 2009, he was the project director of the Independent Task Force that produced U.S. Immigration Policy.

Alden’s previous book, The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11, was a finalist for the Lukas Book Prize, for narrative nonfiction in 2009. The jury called Alden’s book “a masterful job of comprehensive reporting, fair-minded analysis, and structurally sound argumentation.”

Alden was previously the Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times, and prior to that was the newspaper’s Canada bureau chief, based in Toronto. He worked as a reporter at the Vancouver Sun and was the managing editor of the newsletter Inside U.S. Trade, widely recognized as a leading source of reporting on U.S. trade policies. Alden has won several national and international awards for his reporting. He has made numerous TV and radio appearances as an analyst on political and economic issues, including on the BBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

Alden has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Berkeley. He pursued doctoral studies before returning to a journalism career. Alden is the winner of numerous academic awards, including a Mellon fellowship in the humanities and a MacArthur Foundation graduate fellowship.

He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” Government Technology Magazine has judged him to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers, and drivers of information technology,” and the Wharton Business School has given the “Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.”

A sought-after speaker and valued adviser to policymakers around the world, Atkinson’s books include Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Mythology of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018); Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (Yale, 2012), Supply-Side Follies: Why Conservative Economics Fails, Liberal Economics Falters, and Innovation Economics is the Answer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), and The Past And Future Of America’s Economy: Long Waves Of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth (Edward Elgar, 2005). He also has conducted groundbreaking research projects and authored hundreds of articles and reports on technology and innovation-related topics ranging from tax policy to advanced manufacturing, productivity, and global competitiveness. He has testified before the United States Congress more than 30 times.

President Clinton appointed Atkinson to the Commission on Workers, Communities, and Economic Change in the New Economy; the Bush administration appointed him chair of the congressionally created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission; the Obama administration appointed him to the National Innovation and Competitiveness Strategy Advisory Board; as co-chair of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s China-U.S. Innovation Policy Experts Group; to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and the Trump administration appointed him to the G7 Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence.

Atkinson serves on the UK government’s Place Advisory Group to advise the Minister for Science, Research, and Innovation on how policy can drive innovation in more regions. He is a member of the Polaris Council, a body of cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary science and technology policy experts who advise the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team on emergent and emerging issues facing Congress and the nation. He is a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information and a member of the Export-Import Bank of the United States Council on China Competition

Atkinson is a member of the Special Competitive Studies Project. He served on the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age and serves on the boards or advisory councils of the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research and Innovation, and the State Science and Technology Institute. Additionally, Atkinson is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Electronic Government and the Journal of Internet Policy; a member of the Global Innovation Forum Brain Trust; a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; a fellow at the Columbia University Institute of Tele-Information; a fellow of Glocom, a Tokyo-based research institute. He is also an adjunct professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.

Atkinson was previously vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, where he directed the Technology & New Economy Project. He wrote numerous research reports on technology and innovation policy, covering issues such as broadband telecommunications, e-commerce, e-government, privacy, copyright, R&D tax policy, offshoring, and innovation economics.

Previously, Atkinson served as the first executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council (RIEPC), a public-private partnership whose members included the state’s governor, legislative leaders, and both corporate and labor leaders. As head of RIEPC, Atkinson was responsible for drafting a comprehensive economic development strategy for the state and working with the legislature and executive branch of government to successfully implement each element of a 10-point action agenda.

Prior to his service in Rhode Island, Atkinson was a project director at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, where, among other projects, he spearheaded The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America, a seminal report examining the impact of the information technology revolution on America’s urban areas.

As a respected policy expert and commentator, Atkinson has testified numerous times before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and he appears frequently on news and public affairs programs. Among others, these appearances have included interviews on BBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, and NBC Nightly News.

Atkinson holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was awarded the prestigious Joseph E. Pogue Fellowship. He earned his master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Oregon, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2014.

Emily Kilcrease is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at CNAS.

Kilcrease previously served as a deputy assistant U.S. trade representative (USTR), overseeing the development, negotiation, and coordination of U.S. foreign investment policy. She served as the senior career staffer leading USTR’s work on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and coordinated USTR’s policy engagement on related national security and economic tools, including export controls and supply chain risk management. She played a lead role in drafting CFIUS reform regulations, with a focus on transactions involving critical technology and sensitive personal data. She was involved in the negotiation and enforcement of the Phase One Agreement with China, trilateral work with the EU and Japan to counter unfair Chinese trade practices, and the initial negotiations for a free trade agreement with the United Kingdom.

Previously, Kilcrease served on the National Security Council (NSC) as a director for international trade, investment, and development. She focused on reforming U.S. development finance authorities and launched the interagency effort that resulted in the BUILD Act, as well as coordinating policy on women’s economic empowerment. Prior to the NSC, she served at the Department of Commerce overseeing the department’s CFIUS work. She began her government service at the Department of Interior working on trade and environment policy.

Kilcrease’s commentary has been cited by major national press outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Reuters, NPR, and ABC News. She has testified on coercive economic statecraft before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Kilcrease received her MA in international relations, with a concentration in international development and economics, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She received her BA in government from Georgetown University.

Christine McDaniel

Christine McDaniel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Clayton Yuetter Institute of International Trade and Finance at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focuses on international trade, globalization, and intellectual property rights.

McDaniel previously worked at Sidley Austin, LLP, a global law firm, where she was a senior economist. She has held several positions in the U.S. government, including Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Treasury Department and senior trade economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and has worked in the economic offices of the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Trade Representative, and U.S. International Trade Commission.

McDaniel has written for the Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Hill, and Forbes, among others, and her media appearances include CNBC, CBC, BBC, Bloomberg, and MSNBC.

McDaniel spent three years in Australia as deputy chief economist in Australia’s patent office. She has published in the areas of international trade, intellectual property, and empirical trade analysis and modeling. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado and received her B.A. in Economics and Japanese Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.