Published in IMF Finance and Development, 2025
This article argues that international cooperation can advance even when the most powerful players are at odds.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2025. "Multilateralism Can Survive the Loss of Consensus" IMF Finance and Development (Sep), pp. 12-13
Paper
Published in Foreign Policy, 2024
This essay argues that the United States will do well for the world and even better for itself if it becomes better assured and more confident of its place in the international system. That, however, does not mean its being no. 1.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2024. "Why America Should Drop Its Obsession With Being No. 1", Foreign Policy (Fall) pp. 41-43.
Paper
Published in Armstrong, Shiro and Tiberghien, Yves (eds.) Globalization and the Economics, Technology, and Security Nexus, Canberra: ANU Press, 2026
This paper casts within a unified economic framework some key challenges for the global economic order: de-globalization; the rising impracticability of global cooperation; and the increasingly confrontational nature of Great Power competition. In these, economics has been weaponised in the service of national interest. This need be no bad thing. History provides examples where greater openness and freer trade emerge from nations seeking only to advance their own self-interests. But the cases described in the paper provide mixed signals. We find that some developments do draw on a growing zero-sum perception to economic and political engagement. That zero-sum explanation alone, however, is crucially inadequate. Self-serving nations, even when believing the world zero-sum, have under certain circumstances produced outcomes that have benefited all. In other circumstances, perfectly-predicted losses have instead resulted on all sides. Such lose-lose outcomes—epic fail equilibria—generalize the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and are strictly worse than zero-sum. In our analysis, Third Nations—those not frontline in Great Power rivalry—can serve an essential role in averting epic fail outcomes. The policy implication is that Third Nations need to provide platforms that will gently and unobtrusively nudge Great Powers away from epic-fail equilibria and towards inadvertent cooperation.
Recommended citation: Armtrong, Shiro and Quah, Danny. 2026. "Economics for the Global Economic Order: The Tragedy of Epic Fail Equilibria" ch. 6 in Armstrong, Shiro and Tieberghen, Yves (eds.) Globalization and the Economics, Technology, and Security Nexus, Canberra: ANU Press
Paper
Published in Recalibrating Asia's Frontiers, 38th Asia-Pacific Roundtable, Institute of Strategic and International Studies ISIS Malaysia Focus issue no. 24, 2025
This article argues that (too often) we view ourselves as mere price takers and never think to exercise agency to influence the direction of conflict and disruption.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2025. "China Plus One vs world minus one", in Recalibrating Asia's Frontiers, 38th Asia-Pacific Roundtable, Institute of Strategic and International Studies ISIS Malaysia Focus issue no. 24, pp. 33-35
Paper
Published in Besley, Tim, Bucelli, Irene, and Velasco, Andres (eds.) The London Consensus: Economic Principles for the 21st Century, 2025
This paper analyses the impact of trade and technology on aggregate economic performance where poor nations are cheap. The most successful economies are extraordinarily rich without having to be unusually complex.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2025. "Response to Ricardo Hausmann by Danny Quah: The Trade-Technology Relation in Small and Poor Economies", in Besley, Tim, Bucelli, Irene, and Velasco, Andres (eds.) The London Consensus: Economic Principles for the 21st Century.
Paper
Published in Ing, Lili Yan and Rodrik, Dani (eds.) The New Global Economic Order, Routledge, 2025
This paper argues that in a fracturing world order, paradoxically, geopolitics and trade align. It is, thus, a fallacy that geopolitics and economics provide a balance through working in opposition in a fragmenting global economy.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2026. "Correlated Trade and Geopolitics Driving a Fractured World Order" Ch. 5, pp. 54-66, in Ing, Lili Yan and Rodrik, Dani (eds.) The New Global Economic Order, Routledge
Paper
Published in Straits Times, 2026
This article argues that when major powers resort to a “Might Makes Right” strategy, nations need to adapt and mitigate, not acquiesce and appease. History and strategic thinking suggest concrete examples of where adaptation and mitigation are best responses.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny and Ng, Irene. 2026. "Beware the Crocodile: The Challenge for Small States", Straits Times (26 Jan), pp. B1-2
Paper
Published in Straits Times, 2025
This article argues that the rest of the world can choose to align, adapt, or mitigate: it is not an existential crisis if the US withdraws from the multilateral trading system.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2025. "Concede or Resist", Straits Times (02 Sep), pp. 22-23
Paper
Published in China Daily, 2024
This article argues that the global externalities of new energy vehicles have been severely under-estimated, not least due to Great Power competition.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2024. "Tanks rather than Thanks", China Daily (12 Jul)
Paper
Published in Foreign Policy, 2024
This article argues how the global climate crisis has its challenge magnified by the Global North-South divide, i.e., the locational and national mismatch between green finance and technology, based in the North, and the great majority of new carbon emissions, happening in the South.
Recommended citation: Saran, Samir and Quah, Danny. 2024. "The Only Way to Make Climate Progress", Foreign Policy (17 Jan)
Paper
Published in South China Morning Post, 2023
This article argues that the tensions between the US and China affect more than just the world’s two great powers, as everyone is a stakeholder in geopolitical rivalry. If better leadership is not forthcoming, the rest of the world will have to step up and stage a badly needed great power intervention.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2023. "Global Intervention May Be Necessary To Pull The US And China Back From Brink", South China Morning Post (20 Apr)
Paper
Published in Straits Times, 2023
This article argues that in labour markets of the future all of us might be platform workers. The social compact needs to be redrawn accordingly.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2023. "The Hard Truth? Almost Everyone May Be a Platform Worker in the Future", Straits Times (02 Mar), pp. B1-B2
Paper
Published in Straits Times, 2021
This article argues that income inequality is no reliable sufficient statistic: international experience shows inequality can rise even as the poor are being powerfully lifted and, conversely, inequality can remain unchanged and relatively low even as the poor are immiserised even more.
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2022. "Inequality: A tale of three countries", Straits Times (25 Feb), p. A20
Paper
Published in IMF podcasts, Washington DC, 2025
If multilateralism is dying, what new forms of international engagement might emerge? What forces can help surface future multilateralisms and shape their contours?
Recommended citation: Quah, Danny. 2025. "Rethinking Multilateralism", IMF podcast Sep 17, 26m51s, Washington DC
Paper