Governing the Global Economy

The University of California E-conomy Project is a collaborative undertaking of IGCC, the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE), the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, and a number of units at the University of California, Berkeley, including the College of Engineering, the Haas School of Business, and the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS). Participating faculty represent a broad interdisciplinary range of UC Berkeley departments as well as faculty from UC campuses at Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. The project fuses these academics' research agendas with the knowledge and concerns of industry leaders and policymakers, creating an intellectual resource that focuses on the profound transformation being wrought by new digital technologies.

The E-conomy Project is developing new metrics, historical analogs, and business models, and more effective policies, legal frameworks, and corporate strategies. It began with an intentionally broad and basic question: How are digital networks and e-commerce changing the organization of industrial and economic activity? Its ultimate goal is to create a resource that involves industry leaders, policymakers, and academics in discussion and research to conceive new business models, more effective corporate strategies, and informed policies.

A series of workshops in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have produced a large body of research and policy discussion. The first major summary of the project's work is Tracking a Transformation: E-Commerce and the Terms of Competition in Industries (Brookings, 2001). The volume documents how the information technology revolution of the last ten years has begun a fundamental economic transformation and analyzes the way this transformation will affect market structure and pricing models in several major industries: retail financial services, air travel, music, automobiles, semiconductors, hearing instruments, food, textiles, and trucking.

Following up on 2001's highly successful meeting of researchers on the Innovation, Regulation, and the Changing Terms of Competition in Wireless Telecommunications project, a second collaborative meeting between participants from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA) and the E-conomy Project was held 9 December 2002 at UC Berkeley (see participant list). It included presentations on topics such as security and privacy, the next generation network, intellectual property rights, and the political economy of the Internet. A follow-up meeting with the DG Information Society of the European Commission was held in Brussels 17 June 2002.

ETLA-BRIE Collaborative Research Meeting

INTRODUCTION

Session I: Open Networks/Next Generation Networks

Session II: Technology, Security and Privacy

Session III: Production

Session IV: Current Projects in Open Source/IP Policy

Session V: Next Year's Research and Design

Participants

BRIE Student Presenters

*John Zysman is professor of political science at UC Berkeley and co-director of BRIE. Prof. Zysman received his B.A at Harvard and his Ph.D. at MIT. He has written extensively on European and Japanese policy and corporate strategy. His interests also include comparative politics, Western European politics, and political economy. Prof. Zysman's publications include The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (Oxford U. Press, 1992), Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy, with Stephen S. Cohen (Basic Books, 1987), and Governments, Markets, and Growth: Finance and the Politics of Industrial Change (Cornell U. Press, 1983).

**Stephen S. Cohen is professor of regional planning at UC Berkeley and co-director of BRIE. He has extensive experience as an international economic consultant. In the United States, he has served as consultant to the White House, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the House Banking Committee, the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, and the Department of Commerce. Cohen's books include The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Reflections on Our Changing World (co- author, 1993), Reading Our Times (co-editor, 1988), Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy, with John Zysman (Basic Books, 1987), and France in the Troubled World Economy, with Peter Gourevitch (1982). He has received numerous awards, fellowships, and visiting professorships, including the Medal of Paris in 1975.

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