TechWonk Blog
TechWonk Blog
Go Back
-
Today, the United States made trade news for the second day in a row when it announced that Canada would be invited to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement negotiations. The announcement comes on the heels of yesterday’s invitation for Mexico to enter the discussions. Already, nine nations are engaged in the talks -- the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, [...]
-
Today in The Wall Street Journal, ITI president and CEO Dean Garfield and Tom Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, shine bright a light on a new trend of protectionism that threatens job growth and economic opportunity here in the U.S. and around the world. The op-ed’s title captures the problem plainly: “Protectionism Is Back. The 21st-century euphemism is ‘indigenous [...]
-
Next week, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, nicknamed Rio+20, will bring focus on how we live and our impact on the planet. Innovation will be at the heart of the discussions, whether they are focused on agriculture or transportation, curing preventable disease or developing new clean energy sources. And that’s where ITI and the Digital Energy & Sustainability Solutions Campaign (DESSC) [...]
-
For those in the world of environment and sustainability, Rio+20 has long been on the horizon. The conference finally kicks off next week and will mark the 20 anniversary of the previous summit. I won’t be there, but DESSC will and we’ll be helping you experience it on Twitter, Facebook, and this blog. Our efforts start tomorrow, when we will feature an interview with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. [...]
-
At a time when most legislative initiatives in the U.S. grind to a halt, in large part because political jockeying replaces policymaking as the presidential and congressional elections draw closer, America continues to fall behind our biggest economic competitors. Foreign governments continue to pursue policies that will improve their country’s economic prospects while our lawmakers seem frozen in [...]
-
Our immigration system is hurting our nation’s economic recovery. Yes, not exactly breaking news, but we got another reminder of this well-known reality yesterday when the U.S. government announced that all 85,000 new H-1B visas for Fiscal Year 2013, including 20,000 for U.S. advanced degree graduates, were used up as of Monday. It took only ten weeks to hit the H-1B cap. Compare that to last year, [...]
-
Starting Wednesday, the U.S. will host the third U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, with economic issues front and center in the discussions. We expect that one of the trade issues that will come up is the Indian government’s preferential market access (PMA) mandate for electronic goods. It's a policy that could severely hurt trade between the two countries, especially in the technology arena. As the [...]
-
A House subcommittee hearing today focused on the issue of extending temporary business tax measures that influence investment and business decisions in the U.S., and ITI pressed for quicker action by the Congress to move the legislation into law. ITI’s Bret Wincup takes a look at the issues, and you can see the formal statement that ITI provided to the subcommittee. In recent months, there has been [...]
-
President Obama today echoed what TechElect and the innovation sector have argued repeatedly: “It’s a lot easier to deal with deficits and debt if you are growing,” the President told reporters at a Friday morning news conference. He’s spot on. The key question is not whether to grow, but how to grow fastest and strongest. TechElect believes that the way to build an economy that has lasting strength [...]
-
ITI is excited to see momentum building around expansion of the most important trade agreement for the tech industry, the Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Just this week, members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation reaffirmed their commitment to play a key role as the World Trade Organization (WTO) works to expand the ITA. Last month, WTO members met in Geneva to mark the fifteenth anniversary [...]
- ...
- ...