Speaker: Dean and Professor Danny Quah

Dean and Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS

 

Moderator: Associate Professor Ciqi Mei

Hua Yu Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Management, THU

 

Time: Thursday, October 31, 2019 15:00-16:00

Venue: Room 302, School of Public Policy and Management, THU

 

While possible world orders logically have their architectures constructed by the Great Powers, the demand side—the world's smaller states—might well retain agency in determining which world order ultimately prevails. This paper analyses the dynamics of network structures in global trade, investment, and geopolitical voice to examine the contours of a potential bifurcated world order in the wake of the US-China trade conflict. It is in such networks that the choices made by smaller states become most apparent. Using social network analysis the paper finds that the trajectory in these dynamics points to the rise of Asian centrality, the calculated trajectory quantifies this emergence. The estimated arc will only accelerate if the US becomes more autarkic or mercantilist, i.e., should the "America First" strategy become more pronounced, the influence of the US will only continue to diminish.

 

Danny Quah is Dean and Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS.  His current research takes an economic approach to world order, studying the supply and demand of world order: on the one hand, what international system the world’s superpowers provide, and on the other, what world order the global community needs. Quah uses this to recast analysis of global power shifts, the rise of the east, regional order, and models of global power relations.

 

Quah is a member of the Spence-Stiglitz Commission on Global Economic Transformation. He is the author of “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity”.  Quah gave the third LSE-NUS lecture in 2013, and TEDx talks in 2016, 2014, and 2012.  Quah was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, and then Professor of Economics and International Development, and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at LSE.  He had also served as LSE’s Head of Department for Economics, and Council Member on Malaysia’s National Economic Advisory Council. 

 

Quah studied at Princeton, Minnesota, and Harvard.