Danny Quah
@dannyquah.bsky.social
200 followers 27 following 200 posts

Economist who studies Third Nation Agency in Geopolitics

Danny Quah is Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His work includes contributions to the fields of economic growth, development economics, monetary economics, macroeconometrics, and the weightless economy. Quah is best known for his research on estimation techniques for disentangling the effects of different disturbances on economies, for his studies on economic growth and convergence across nation states, and for his analyses of large-scale shifts in the global economy. Quah became the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, beginning his term on 1 May 2018. .. more

Economics 84%
Political science 6%
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... that uses both foreign policy and national economic tools to advance personal self-interest:

NYT 2025 "Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex" (25 May)

If economic fetishism prioritized economic efficiency over national security, and economic statecraft reversed that causality, then instead of debating which side is right, we should instead be looking at state extractionism ...

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/w...
Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex
www.nytimes.com

Of course, others went to Princeton too. But not all who start together end up in the same place.

Princeton classmate, thinker, and professional. So, after Milley left service, many of us recalled: "A nation that makes a sharp separation between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools".

www.politico.com/news/2023/09...
Milley in farewell speech: ‘We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator’
The remarks come one week after former President Donald Trump suggested the retiring general should be killed.
www.politico.com

That couple months when I got to meet up with my former students from LSE and LKYSPP, now all across the world, changing it.

Why capacity-building is great, of course, improving the supply side. But economics also flags the limits to that strategy. Not least in a world of fraying multilateralism and hesitant globalisation, especially if your economy is a billion-people one.

Facebook reminds me that as recently as nine years ago the world, its universities, and their headlines were very different from today.

"Tell me you're social media naive without telling me you're social media naive." What's your favorite "tell me without telling me" meme (or collection) that I can show someone who still doesn't get it?

Economics seminars ain't what they used to be.
www.politico.com/news/magazin...

"If the international system is to endure, it must have more than just great- or middle-power leadership. Incentive compatibility must replace the idea that size matters and will add more to resilience than explicit contractual collaboration agreements."

www.imf.org/en/Publicati...

World Order Minus One

In a world of unpredictable great powers, adaptation leaves small states exposed. Mitigation, through proactive economic statecraft and pathfinder multilateralism, offers an attractive alternative.

www.straitstimes.com/opinion/conc...

If major powers are tearing up the global rulebook, what principles might help frame the way forwards?

The London Consensus - Oct 2025
Published 16th October, via OpenAccess publishing, will be free to read and download.
press.lse.ac.uk/books/e/10.3...

What The Big Bang Theory and TV drama continue to miss is how in graduate school it is students of public policy that are awesome.

Lee Kuan Yew School of Policy

Unbelievably, it's now 43 years to the month since I first met this man who became my PhD supervisor and taught me so many of the tools and ideas I still use today. And today still he inspires with his humility, his curiosity, and his conviction on the ideals of scholarship.

Boao Forum
全球南方的多边主义悲剧 | 博鳌发言
where I suggest that multilateralism decays, not passively because of benign neglect, but actively because of the dynamics of costs and benefits.
(English links at the bottom)
mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lLc3me7B9f...

Friends are helping me port to my own Weixin official account things I've written they feel should be read in China in Chinese. We agreed to begin with this one
致特朗普:美国不要再沉迷于“世界第一”了 | 狮城来信

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nBZFGU4x50...

Meltdown of order is both trope and reality of our time.

Does the global economy shift from our lifting others so we raise ourselves, or from keeping others down?

Obviously we each said what we thought.

Correlated Trade and Geopolitics Driving a Fractured World Order
This article argues that in a fracturing world order geopolitics and trade align. It is, thus, a fallacy that geopolitics and economics provide a balance through working in opposition.

dannyquah.github.io/publications...

Is the conventional capacity-building of economic development the right response? What can we do better?

lkyspp.sg/world-bank-a... including Selina Ho and Saravanan Ravindran from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

The China Shock can be viewed as import flow or as price effect. The latter, pricing the China Shock, helps explain why industrial policy attempting to protect specific sectors ends up, in reality, penalizing those same sectors.
open.substack.com/pub/dannyqua...

Thirty years after when we were new full professors at LSE, of traversing the planet physically, Hyunsong Shin and I again got to sit down together and discuss convergent research, this time on geopolitics and world order, multilateralism, and global monetary and financial stability.

Kanti Bajpai has retired from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. We made him Emeritus Professor. And a farewell video:

youtu.be/duZgJF8JMe8
Farewell Tribute to Professor Kanti Bajpai
YouTube video by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School)
youtu.be

Elina Noor and I team up with Melisa Idris, and talk new world order and what, when we're outside Great Power frontlines, we should be doing. The new world order is too important to be left to those primed only for conflict and gridlock www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Yd...
Consider This: The US, China, and a Changing Asia
YouTube video by Astro AWANI
www.youtube.com

Why did I write that America needs to stop obsessing about being number 1?
And other things we talk about in Asia.

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LlVtU0dy4H... (Chinese text)
www.sztv.com.cn/ysz/dsdb/szw... (English video)

To continue my work on the intersection of geopolitics and international economics in the new world order, and on social mobility and income inequality with the Social Mobility Foundation...
www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pr...

I'm speaking in Hong Kong (public event) on the fractured world order, seeking to understand not only its economic consequences, but also its causes.

www.asiaglobalinstitute.hku.hk/eventdetail/...

At World Economic Forum, there are many things you're expected to do. This week in Tianjin I'm mostly chillin' with my friends in the media.
(What I actually said will have to wait for later #amnc25 )

Without elastic demand---because, perhaps, markets in the rest of the world have closed in on themselves---raising supply-side productivity doesn't raise living standards, only unemployment

US shakes up Europe's security architecture, Mar 2025. EU starts to discuss new strategic doctrine, on step-by-step European independence from the US.

US takes on international economic system, Apr 2025 Liberation Day tariffs.
All "these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass."

Reposted by Danny Quah