Economic development and growth theory have long grappled with the consequences of cross-border flows of goods, services, ideas, and people. But the most significant growth in cross-border flows now comes in the form of data. Like other flows, data flows can demonstrate imbalances among exports and imports. Some of these flows represent ‘raw’ data while others represent high-value-added data products. Does any of this make a difference in national economic development trajectories? This paper argues that the answer is yes. After reviewing the core logic of ‘high development theories’ from the twentieth century, I analyze the sometimes implicit applications of these arguments to data as they are evolving in the existing literature. I then put forward a different argument which takes better account of unique characteristics of the political economy that emerges at the intersection of data, machine learning, and the platform firms that use them. I explore the implications of this new argument for some policy choices that governments face with regard to data localization, import substitution, and other decisions relevant to growth in both advanced and emerging economies.

Recent surveys revealed few producers in an export sector participate in trade. Economists explained this result by relaxing their assumption about firms’ operations, to produce a novel observation: Trade liberalization disproportionately benefits the most efficient producers in the sector, while potentially harming the least efficient. Political scientists have begun exploring the consequences of this variation, especially in lobbying. This article explores whether the impact of this finer-grained description of interests can be observed in the later stages of our demand-driven models of the politics of trade. I focus on one case with characteristics favorable to observing intra-industry differences: the American steel industry in Taft's presidency. A trade-based cleavage inside the sector determined firms’ interests. Demands shaped policy, as observed in three pieces of legislation: the Payne-Aldrich Act, reciprocity with Canada, and the 1912 tariff. The first liberalized trade in steel, intensifying competition in the industry. The second promised to do the same, with a similar impact. The third had no effect, however, because Taft vetoed the bill. This case illustrates intra-industry firm heterogeneity can provide additional accuracy, revealing a previously undiscovered cleavage. Nonetheless, preferences alone did not determine policy.

Many scholars have studied the use of negative advertising in campaigns and what motivates candidates and groups to run negative ads. Recent elections, however, have seen a dramatic increase in advertising by outside groups, particularly by so-called “dark-money” organizations, which do not disclose their donor information. This study questions whether dark-money groups are more likely to engage in negative advertising. By examining the more than 13,000 outside-group expenditures from the 2010 through the 2014 congressional elections, it finds that outside groups are, indeed, more likely to use negative ads when they conceal their donor information. Additionally, while liberal and conservative groups are roughly equally likely to use negative ads, conservative groups are most likely to use anonymously funded negative advertisements. This could be, at least in part, due to the support conservative groups receive from organized businesses, which generally seek to conceal their political activities from public scrutiny.

The promotion of additive manufacturing (AM) as a set of enabling technologies has been a prominent feature of new policies seeking to revitalize manufacturing in developed economies. Because of its differences from traditional manufacturing technologies, small businesses, in particular, face high costs in adopting AM methods. How can governments assist small firms and their innovation ecosystems to make significant leaps in enabling technologies? This paper conceptualizes the challenges faced by groups of small enterprises adopting new technologies and a decentralized policy effort to systematically increase the use of advanced manufacturing technologies. In Canada, funding used by community colleges to create applied research centers has been intended to establish anchors for local “industrial commons” around advanced manufacturing methods. By providing both information and working capital to private sector partners, these community college programs should ideally mitigate challenges to the adoption of AM technologies—the so-called “valley of death”—in local ecosystems. There are many successful individual cases of partnership (i.e., private goods); however, this bottom-up approach seems to fail both as a means of promoting vibrant industrial commons (i.e., public goods) and as a coherent national strategy. We trace the challenges of this approach to principal-agent problems associated with layering new programs upon existing organizations, the density of program participants, and the presence of appropriate technologies.

The rise of public policies in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) suggests a reassertion of state power over a phenomenon initially designed to weaken public authorities. But depending on policy objectives and underlying state-business relationships, CSR public policies seem to oscillate between the steering of corporate conduct towards political goals and the provision of political support to business interests. The present paper offers new perspectives on this ambiguity. Using social systems theory to guide a comparative study of two major Indian CSR policies, the analysis distinguishes two levels. At a functional level, the introduction of CSR in Indian regulatory politics produced more or less constraining expectations that open up opportunities for companies to participate in the performance of political functions. At an operational level, however, even a “mandatory” policy designed primarily according to political calculations let companies decide how they perform these functions. This persistence of voluntarism, which is supported by the semantic properties of “CSR,” consolidates the role of profit-driven calculations in the regulation of corporate conduct and, in the Indian case, in the redistribution of resources for social welfare. Research perspectives on the implications of CSR public policies for democracy are outlined in concluding remarks.