The widely respected Institute for International Economics is 25 years old. It's changed its name (now the "Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics," or "Peterson Institute") to honor the former Secretary of Commerce, and long-time Institute Board Chairman.
Its Director, C. Fred Bergsten, has written a history of the Institute (The Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics at Twenty-five), with lots of insights into the strategy it's pursued. Here is future Institute Board Chairman Peterson, identifying a market niche (based on the time frames held by different institutional participants in the policy process):
"Our chairman-to-be, Peter G. Peterson, suggested that our work should focus on the medium run of one to three years because this is the period that most concerns sitting officials but on which they receive very little useful advice from the government bureaucracy (with its short-term orientation) or the academic world (with its long-term emphasis).
The Institute wants to share the joy - from their newsletter:
Special Anniversary Offer
As part of the celebration of the Peterson Institute's 25th anniversary we are offering you 25 percent off your order. To receive the discount, please enter anniversary as the Promotional Discount Code when ordering. The word "anniversary" is case sensitive.
Browse the Institute Bookstore
Steven Pearlstein offers an anniversary evaluation in the Washington Post: A Free-Trade Zone for Ideas (October 20), emphasizing the Institute's expertise:
Columnist Michael Kinsley, toting up the number of times my late colleague Hobart Rowen had quoted Fred in a typical year, first exposed how hopelessly dependent the press had become on the institute. And over the years, my own editors have sometimes asked why all the people quoted in my stories were from the same think tank. My only reply is that the IIE crowd is simply the best: economists whose deep knowledge of a topic is leavened with hands-on policy experience. They also have the uncanny knack of having just completed a book or monograph on a topic as the rest of us were beginning to focus on it.
Its willingness to examine a range of view points:
It has produced many of the most-cited studies in defense of free trade, to the dismay of the anti-globalization left....
In reality, there is no orthodoxy on these or other matters at IIE. At the same time some scholars are toting up the gains from trade, others are hammering out details of policies such as wage insurance and expanded unemployment insurance to help redistribute the benefits of trade from the winners to the losers within the United States.
It is worth noting that among the IIE's many publications, two of the biggest-selling have been Dani Rodrik's "Has Globalization Gone Too Far?," probably the most thoughtful critique of free trade; and Laura D'Andrea Tyson's classic, "Who's Bashing Whom?," which makes the case that managed trade may be better than free trade in certain high-tech industries....
...In an era when everything in Washington, including its think tanks, has become more ideological and partisan, IIE has refused to go along. It remains one of the few places where a journalist, legislator or economic policymaker can go for unbiased data and reasoned analysis. In the world of international economics, it's left everyone else in the dust.
and the role of Director Bergsten (including his attention to detail):
In many ways, the institute is the creation of C. Fred Bergsten, who has become the model of a Washington policy entrepreneur... It is Bergsten's vision and energy, his intellectual honesty and relentless networking, that lie behind the institute's success.
I don't remember why it was that I called Fred the first time. But I do remember Fred's call to me the day my otherwise inconsequential story appeared, to point out my serious mistake: It was the Institute for International Economics, he emphasized, not the Institute of. . . .
Part of Fred's genius is that he's not only open to outsiders and opposing views -- he actively seeks them out," Rodrik told me this week.
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