Learning from the world: new ideas to redevelop America

What can America learn from countries as faraway and diverse as Bhutan, Chile, Denmark, Nigeria and South Korea? Quite a lot, as it turns out. At a time of fundamental change in global power, the country that undisputedly ruled the latter half of the 20th century is no longer firmly in the lead. In the search for new ideas to redevelop America, co-editors Joe Colombano and Aniket Shah point to what has happened outside the borders of the United States. By relying on a wealth of cross-country and multi-disciplinary contributions from an impressive number of world-renown experts, the editors provide a systematic review of successful policies undertaken overseas, discuss their relevance to the US, and offer them as contributions to the national debate on the future of the American economy. What they find is a rich set of policy recipes - from maintaining fiscal discipline and fostering growth, to reviving competitiveness to ensuring equity and basic human decency.

Introduction : A new approach to redevelop America / Joe Colombano and Aniket Shah -- Macroeconomic change. Global financial integration, China, and the role of America / Ning Zhu -- A lesson from the south for fiscal policy in the US and other advance countries / Jeffrey Frankel -- Breaking through on job creation / Bill Drayton -- Taming deficits : automatic debt brakes and participatory democracy in Switzerland / Thomas Held and Simon Ingold -- Institutional framework and policy tools. The German labor market in the great recession : lessons for other countries / Felix Hüfner, Andreas Wörgötter, and Caroline Klein -- A new housing finance system for the US? : Lessons from the Danish model / Morten Baekmand Nielsen and Jesper Berg -- For a national investment bank / Robert Skidelsky and Felix Martin -- Infrastructure, innovation, and competitiveness. Boosting export growth : lessons from Korea / Abraham Kim and Whitney Haring-Smith -- Smart cities, smart US : international models / Nashid Nabian -- Brazil : an emerging economic power committed to sustainability / Emma Torres, Sérgio Besserman Vianna, and Kevin Currey -- Social policies. Health for America : European arguments fo…