Recommended Weekend Reads

Written By Francis Kelly

Trump’s Major Focus on Latin America, Trudeau Resigns – Now What?,  Agriculture Is A Major Factor For Ukraine Peace, Africa Needs A Payments Union, and The Evolution of Remote Working

January 10 - 12, 2025

Please find below our recommended reads from reports and articles we read in the last week.  We hope you find these useful and that you have a relaxing weekend.   And let us know if you or someone you know wants to be added to our distribution list.

  

The Americas 

  • This Administration is Shaping Up to Be Latin America-First    Ryan Berg/Foreign Policy

    One of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s most lasting slogans of governance is that “personnel is policy.” Judged using Reagan’s mantra, it appears as though the incoming Trump team could be rightly described as the United States’ first Latin America-focused administration in at least a century—and perhaps ever.

  • Eric Farnsworth on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Resignation  Americas Society/Council of the Americas

    On January 6, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning from his role after nearly a decade in leadership. The decision was announced ahead of planned October elections for this year and days before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to annex Canada and place 25 percent tariffs on its exports, takes office. Trudeau’s resignation triggered the shutdown of Canada’s Parliament until March 24.  “Canadian politics will be fairly chaotic over this year, 2025,” explained Eric Farnsworth, vice president of AS/COA and head of the Washington office. “You could have as many as three prime ministers in the country in a period of nine or 10 months. You have a scenario where Canada itself lacks the firepower to really push back against the United States.” Farnsworth discusses what to expect from Trudeau’s resignation, the state of the opposition, and Canada’s place in the Western Hemisphere.

  • How COVID Changed Latin America   Oliver Kaplan, Michale Albertus, Diana Senior-Angula, and Gustavo Flores-Macías/Journal of Democracy

    Abstract: Covid-19 was a pressure test for democracy in Latin America. The pandemic hit the region harder than any other in the world, particularly in terms of covid death rates and rising poverty. The pandemic also created opportunities to consolidate and abuse power, resulting in selective human rights repression, power grabs, militarization, and corruption. However, the effects were not uniformly negative. The pandemic also prompted renewed economic crisis management, social mobilization, and local checks to central power. Drawing on the experiences of countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and Peru, this essay illustrates that although the pandemic strained democratic politics, good pandemic management may have stemmed democratic decay. New forms of mobilization and policy implementation emerged, as well as new openings for political challengers that will shape the coming decade of governance in the region.

 

Russia’s War on Ukraine

  • Farming Frontlines: How Food and Agriculture Will Impact Negotiations in Ukraine  Center for Strategic and International Studies Futures Lab Audio Brief

    Russia’s recent attacks on Greater Odesa port infrastructure and foreign-flagged grain-carrying vessels in the Black Sea marked the most intense attacks on Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure in over a year. Four of the ships hit in October were carrying agricultural commodities, including vegetable oil for the UN World Food Programme in Gaza, as well as corn and grain shipments for Egypt, Italy, and Southern Africa, according to statements by the Ukrainian and UK governments. As widely reported by CSIS and others, Ukraine’s agriculture sector has been a major front in Russia’s war in Ukraine since February 2022. With the September and October 2024 attacks, Russia continues its system-wide attacks on Ukraine’s agriculture infrastructure, negatively affecting Ukraine’s agricultural production and exports and thereby undercutting a major source of Ukraine’s export revenue.

  • How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine   New York Times Magazine

    Outnumbered and desperate, the nation began hacking cheap consumer drones with explosives — bringing a brutal new form of violence to 21st-century warfare.

 

China

  • Charting China’s Export Controls: Predicting Impacts on Critical U.S. Supply Chains  The National Bureau of Asian Research

    The PRC’s export control regime has grown and formalized in recent years in response to an increasingly active and complex landscape of U.S. and allied export controls. The PRC’s system of export controls has historically been piecemeal, and its administration poorly understood. Recent formalization of the system beginning in 2020 and escalating in 2023 is consistent with the PRC’s increased exercise of lawfare and demonstrates greater regulatory capabilities. PRC authorities are able to weaponize supply chains by targeting specific critical minerals under new export controls. 

  • What Gold’s Crazy Run Says About China  Bloomberg YouTube Channel

    Gold prices have been on a rampage, hitting record after record. While driven in part by geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty and the prospect of lower US interest rates, unrelenting demand from China has also played a big part.

  • Measuring China’s Manufacturing Might  Center for Strategic and International Studies

    China’s manufacturing sector has been pivotal to the country’s rapid economic rise. Yet China’s industrial might has become a source of friction as the United States, Europe, and other economies seek to defend and nurture their own manufacturing sectors. In the face of mounting geopolitical tensions, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is doubling down with repeated calls for China to become a “manufacturing power” (制造强国) and lead the world in producing high-value, high-technology goods. This ChinaPower tracker examines these dynamics through 10 charts, visualizing the rise of China’s manufacturing sector and Beijing’s efforts to cement its industrial superpower status for future decades.

  • China – North Korea Evolving Relations: A Conversation with Dr. Feng Zhang  China Power Podcast

    In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Feng Zhang joins us to discuss China-North Korea relations in light of the growing Russia-North Korea relationship and the deployment of North Korean troops to support Russia. Dr. Zhang discusses how the China-North Korea relationship has suffered in recent years, in part due to China joining UN sanctions against North Korea in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic, and North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Dr. Zhang explains that China has a waning influence over North Korea, evidenced most strongly through the recent further alignment between Pyongyang and Moscow. 

  

Geoeconomics and Demographics

  • The Evolution of Remote Work Across Industries: From Potential to Practice   Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

    As the St. Louis Fed has reported before, work from home (WFH) rose rapidly in the U.S. following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although WFH rates are down from their pandemic peak, they have stabilized well above prepandemic levels. For example, the share of those working from home all workdays rose from 7% just before the pandemic to 32% in May 2020 and has remained at about 12% since 2022. This raises the questions: Why are some workers continuing to work from home when they did not before the pandemic? And why have others resumed commuting even though they worked from home during the pandemic? In this blog post, we focus on one key factor in understanding WFH variation across workers: the industry in which they are employed.  Industries matter because job tasks vary widely across them, and some tasks are much easier to perform remotely than others. This variation in WFH feasibility, or potential, plays a crucial role in determining how much industries were able to pivot to remote work both during and after the height of the pandemic.

  •   World Depopulation: Prospects and Implications   Nicholas Eberstadt/AEI Foreign & Defense Working Paper

    Abstract: Though few yet see it coming, a momentous turning point for humanity is looming immediately ahead. We are about to enter a new age of human history. Call it the epoch of the “population implosion”. Because it is arriving quietly, without fanfare—almost on tiptoes—it is catching us by surprise. The world population explosion is almost over. With birth rates plummeting and sub-replacement fertility taking hold around the world, we are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite de-population: starting already—and not just with countries, but entire geographic regions—eventually encompassing the planet as a whole. There is no avoiding the great depopulations that lie ahead—they are already “baked into the cake”, fused into the foundations of societies all around the world by birth choices today’s parents have already made. The only question is how soon and how fast these coming depopulations transform life as we know it.

 

  • Are Big Cities Important for Economic Growth?   Mathew Turner & David N. Weil/NBER

    Abstract: Cities are often described as engines of economic growth. We assess this statement quantitatively. We focus on two mechanisms: a static agglomeration effect that makes production in bigger cities more efficient, and a dynamic effect whereby urban scale impacts the productivity of invention, which in turn determines the speed of technological progress for the country as a whole. Using estimates of these effects from the literature and MSA-level patent and population data since 1900, we ask how much lower US output would be in 2010 if city size had been limited to one million or one hundred thousand starting in 1900. These effects are small. If city sizes had been limited to one million people since 1900, output in 2010 would have been only 8% lower than its observed value.

 

Africa

Francis Kelly
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