Institutional Design for a World of New Economic Statecraft

Abstract

The rise of “new economic statecraft”—intervention in trade and investment for foreign policy reasons—is increasingly threatening the stability of the global economic system.Building on joint work with Andrew Reddie, I have examined the types of intervention we have seen, classifying state measures as behind the border, at the border, and beyond the border.In addition, in the past, we have focused on understanding variation in new forms of economic statecraft through a five-factor model.This talk evaluates alternatives for constraining economic statecraft via institutional approaches. To this end, it focuses on an analytical classification to theoretically and empirically analyze both sectoral and overall bilateral, minilateral, and multilateral institutional approaches to glean lessons for the management of new economic statecraft.

Bio

Vinod (Vinnie) Aggarwal is Distinguished Professor and holds the Alann P. Bedford Endowed Chair, Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor, Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center, Berkeley Law School, all at UC Berkeley. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge University journal Business and Politics. 

Dr. Aggarwal is a lifetime Council on Foreign Relations member and has held fellowships from the Brookings Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, East-West Center, Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Japan Foundation. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, INSEAD, Yonsei University, Bocconi University, NTU Singapore, Chung-Ang University, and the University of Hawaii, where he is an Affiliate Faculty member in Asian Studies. He has won the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award for both MBA and Ph.D. teaching at the Haas School of Business. Prof. Aggarwal has published 25 books and 140 articles and book chapters.

His most recent books are Great Power Competition and Middle Power Strategies, Springer(2023); the Oxford Handbook on Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft, Oxford (2025); and Governing Growth: Industrial Policy from Hamilton to Trump, Oxford (2026). He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.