Institute Welcomes Peter Gourevitch

Peter Gourevitch, Professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego, visited the Institute Thursday to meet with students before giving a campus wide talk on the implications of the current economic crisis. Gourevitch is a specialist in political economy with a particular focus on international trade and economic globalization, trade disputes, regulatory systems, and corporate governance.

In his campus wide talk, Gourevitch gave his answer to the question: How does the current global crisis in the economy resemble earlier economic shocks, and what can we learn from those other episodes about issues that face U.S. and world policy makers? To Gourevitch, several themes appear striking: the interaction of "private bonding" arrangements and government regulation in shaping the trust that underlies economic life; the pattern of cycles vs. sequences in explaining how countries converge or diverge in what they do; the relationship between economic shock and political choices; the autonomy of the state; the role of ideology in shaping economic policy outcomes; the interaction of globalization and domestic politics.