Master the forces redrawing the global economic map!

If you have found your way to World Economy Lab, you are probably already frustrated with the quality of analysis available on the most consequential economic questions of our time. The commentary on AI and jobs tends toward either breathless disruption narrative or reflexive reassurance. The debate over industrial policy and techno-nationalism is frequently conducted without any serious engagement with what industrial policy has actually produced across different institutional systems. The coverage of US–China economic rivalry rarely rises above geopolitical surface. You are looking for something harder, more precise, and more honest about complexity — and that is exactly the standard this curriculum is designed to meet.

The analytical tradition I work within is comparative institutional economics and political economy — the intellectual lineage that runs from the Varieties of Capitalism framework through developmental-state theory, long-wave technology analysis, and the economics of platforms and digital markets. These are not fashionable frameworks. They are durable ones. They survived the last decade of hyperglobalisation triumphalism, and they are proving their worth again now as the structural contradictions of that era become undeniable. I have built this curriculum around them because I believe that any serious analyst of the global economy — whether working in a graduate programme, a policy institution, or a corporate strategy function — needs command of these tools before they can say anything reliable about where the world is going.

The curriculum does not offer you a single thesis about the future. It offers you something more valuable: the analytical architecture to build and defend your own. You will work through real country cases — the institutional logic of the US system, Germany's social-market model, China's state-capitalist developmental apparatus, the varied responses of emerging economies navigating a bifurcating world order. You will trace the full historical arc of technological revolutions, from the steam-driven factory system through electrification and Fordism to the ICT revolution that produced global value chains, so that you can situate the current AI moment inside a proper comparative sequence rather than treating it as unprecedented. And you will engage with the hardest contemporary questions — platform monopoly power, the data-accumulation logic of Big Tech, the semiconductor export-control battles, the EU's search for strategic autonomy — using frameworks precise enough to generate answers that hold up to scrutiny.

I want to be direct about what this school expects of you. This is not a survey course. It is not designed to give you a comfortable overview. Each unit builds on the last, the vocabulary of institutional economics is used without apology, and you will be asked to compare, contrast, and take positions — not retreat to both-sides hedging. The policy brief work at the end of the curriculum is genuine: I want you to leave capable of writing the kind of analysis that actually informs decisions at the level of government, multilateral institutions, or senior corporate leadership.

If that standard appeals to you — if you want to understand not just what is happening in the global economy but why, at a structural level, with intellectual tools rigorous enough to earn the respect of specialists — then I would like you to join the Lab. The work is demanding. The frameworks are worth it.