Danny Quah

Next weekend I'm trying out some ideas in England

Actually, my job here is to help develop sound economic statecraft to protect my part of the world from the MAGA "America First" geoeconomics of a globally irresponsible United States.

(And when I do that here, I'm not being just a development economist.)

DannyQuah.github.io/Storage/2025...

When I returned to SE Asia in 2016, a good friend at a top US Economics Department told me I had obviously decided to take the easy way out and retired, so I would no longer have to compete in the fierce competition of frontier economic ideas.

Along with President Xi and PM Lawrence Wong, I'm Team "Mitigate, don't align." Don't even not align.

www.straitstimes.com/singapore/po...

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/w...

www.straitstimes.com/opinion/conc...

The Global Distribution of Authorship in Economics Journals
Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Australia are not developing countries but I reckon the conclusions are invariant if we changed "developing" to "outside the North Transatlantic Axis".
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

YouTube video by Astro AWANI Consider This: The US, China, and a Changing Asia

We have learnt that America's elasticity is either zero or negative. Nations that have worked hard have not only gotten nothing in return; in several high-profile cases, their circumstances have instead worsened.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Yd...
open.substack.com/pub/dannyqua...

Geoeconomics isn't "the economics of the global economy" or "economic security". Instead, geoeconomics is, as economic statecraft, the use of economic tools for foreign policy goals. So, doing geoeconomics means knowing your enemy, or identifying the shocks hitting your economy.

... that uses both foreign policy and national economic tools to advance personal self-interest:

NYT 2025 "Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex" (25 May)

Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex

If economic fetishism prioritized economic efficiency over national security, and economic statecraft reversed that causality, then instead of debating which side is right, we should instead be looking at state extractionism ...

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/w...

Of course, others went to Princeton too. But not all who start together end up in the same place.

Milley in farewell speech: ‘We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator’ The remarks come one week after former President Donald Trump suggested the retiring general should be killed.

Princeton classmate, thinker, and professional. So, after Milley left service, many of us recalled: "A nation that makes a sharp separation between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools".

www.politico.com/news/2023/09...

That couple months when I got to meet up with my former students from LSE and LKYSPP, now all across the world, changing it.

Why capacity-building is great, of course, improving the supply side. But economics also flags the limits to that strategy. Not least in a world of fraying multilateralism and hesitant globalisation, especially if your economy is a billion-people one.

Facebook reminds me that as recently as nine years ago the world, its universities, and their headlines were very different from today.

"Tell me you're social media naive without telling me you're social media naive." What's your favorite "tell me without telling me" meme (or collection) that I can show someone who still doesn't get it?

Economics seminars ain't what they used to be.
www.politico.com/news/magazin...

"If the international system is to endure, it must have more than just great- or middle-power leadership. Incentive compatibility must replace the idea that size matters and will add more to resilience than explicit contractual collaboration agreements."

www.imf.org/en/Publicati...

World Order Minus One

In a world of unpredictable great powers, adaptation leaves small states exposed. Mitigation, through proactive economic statecraft and pathfinder multilateralism, offers an attractive alternative.

www.straitstimes.com/opinion/conc...

If major powers are tearing up the global rulebook, what principles might help frame the way forwards?

The London Consensus - Oct 2025
Published 16th October, via OpenAccess publishing, will be free to read and download.
press.lse.ac.uk/books/e/10.3...

What The Big Bang Theory and TV drama continue to miss is how in graduate school it is students of public policy that are awesome.

Lee Kuan Yew School of Policy

Unbelievably, it's now 43 years to the month since I first met this man who became my PhD supervisor and taught me so many of the tools and ideas I still use today. And today still he inspires with his humility, his curiosity, and his conviction on the ideals of scholarship.

Boao Forum
全球南方的多边主义悲剧 | 博鳌发言
where I suggest that multilateralism decays, not passively because of benign neglect, but actively because of the dynamics of costs and benefits.
(English links at the bottom)
mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lLc3me7B9f...

Friends are helping me port to my own Weixin official account things I've written they feel should be read in China in Chinese. We agreed to begin with this one
致特朗普：美国不要再沉迷于“世界第一”了 | 狮城来信

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nBZFGU4x50...

Meltdown of order is both trope and reality of our time.

Does the global economy shift from our lifting others so we raise ourselves, or from keeping others down?

Obviously we each said what we thought.

Correlated Trade and Geopolitics Driving a Fractured World Order
This article argues that in a fracturing world order geopolitics and trade align. It is, thus, a fallacy that geopolitics and economics provide a balance through working in opposition.

dannyquah.github.io/publications...

Is the conventional capacity-building of economic development the right response? What can we do better?

lkyspp.sg/world-bank-a... including Selina Ho and Saravanan Ravindran from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

The China Shock can be viewed as import flow or as price effect. The latter, pricing the China Shock, helps explain why industrial policy attempting to protect specific sectors ends up, in reality, penalizing those same sectors.
open.substack.com/pub/dannyqua...

Thirty years after when we were new full professors at LSE, of traversing the planet physically, Hyunsong Shin and I again got to sit down together and discuss convergent research, this time on geopolitics and world order, multilateralism, and global monetary and financial stability.

YouTube video by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School) Farewell Tribute to Professor Kanti Bajpai

Kanti Bajpai has retired from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. We made him Emeritus Professor. And a farewell video:

youtu.be/duZgJF8JMe8

YouTube video by Astro AWANI Consider This: The US, China, and a Changing Asia

Elina Noor and I team up with Melisa Idris, and talk new world order and what, when we're outside Great Power frontlines, we should be doing. The new world order is too important to be left to those primed only for conflict and gridlock www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Yd...