Event Report  International Exchange

Jay K. Rosengard Seminar "Making Trump Great Again: US Political Economy After the Mid-Term Elections"

February 4, 2019
Venue: CIGS Meeting Room

For a better grasp of electoral prospects in 2020, Professor Jay Rosengard presented his performance evaluation of the Trump administration following the 2018 mid-term elections by juxtaposing the policies of Trumpenomics, including low taxes and "America first" trade, and Trumpolemics, including anti-immigration and anti-abortion, together with their long-term impacts on the U.S. economy as well as their short-term impacts on Trump's goal to "Make America Great Again (MAGA)."

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(Mr. Rosengard, Mr. Kurihara from the left)

Seminar outline
Title: "Making Trump Great Again: US Political Economy After the Mid-Term Elections"
Speaker: Jay K. Rosengard, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)
Moderator: Jun Kurihara, Research Director, CIGS


Program
ProgramPDF: 197KB


Presentation
Presentation by Professor RosengardPDF: 1.01MB

Abstract of the Speech
January 2019 marks the two-year anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration as the 45th president of the United States. It also comes on the heels of America's November 2018 mid-term elections, seen by many as a referendum on the Trump presidency. This is thus an opportune time to explore the U.S. electorate's assessment of both President Trump and the Republican-led Congress. Are people pleased with the Administration's supply-side, trickle-down Trumpenomics characterized by de-regulation, low taxes, and high expenditures? Are they happy with the President's "America First" Trumpolemics consisting of nativism, isolationism, and trade wars? To answer these questions, Professor Rosengard will examine the current political economy of the United States, including implications for other countries as well as the U.S. 2020 presidential election.


Speaker's profile
Jay K. Rosengard
Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, has forty years of international experience designing, implementing, and evaluating development policies in public finance and fiscal strategy, tax and budget reform, municipal finance and management, intergovernmental fiscal relations, banking and financial institutions development, financial inclusion, micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) finance, mobile banking, and public administration. He has worked for a wide variety of multilateral and bilateral donors, as well as directly for host governments and private sector clients. Rosengard is Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government's Financial Sector Program, which focuses on the development of bank and nonbank financial institutions and alternative financing instruments. This includes microfinance (small-scale lending and local savings mobilization), mainstream commercial banking (general and special-purpose banks), and wholesale financial intermediation (municipal development funds, venture capital funds, pooled financing, secondary mortgage facilities, and securitization). In addition, Rosengard is a Faculty Affiliate of both the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Center for International Development. At the Ash Center, he is Senor Adviser of the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia and Faculty Chair of the HKS Indonesia Program. He also serves as Faculty Chair of four executive programs: FIPED (Financial Institutions for Private Enterprise Development), which focuses on sustainable and effective MSME finance; ComTax (Comparative Tax Policy and Administration), which addresses key strategic and tactical issues in tax design and implementation; VELP (Vietnam Executive Leadership Program), which is an innovative policy dialogue with senior Vietnamese leadership; and Transformasi (Leadership Transformation in Indonesia), which is designed to assist Indonesia in its decentralization initiatives.