The major economies in the G-7 need more investments in R&D and collaboration in science and technology to compete with China, says former US assistant trade representative Harry Broadman at CNBC. “We’ve done really well among democratic countries collaborating on investment and trade, but we’ve done an extraordinarily poor job in R&D,” he said.
CNBC:
Harry Broadman, managing director and chair of the emerging markets and CFIUS practices at Berkeley Research Group, told CNBC last week that developed countries’ ability to create, execute and sell products that advance the climate agenda without negatively affecting the labor market would shape the economic landscape in the coming years.
“As long as people believe that there is going to be a market for such technologies and that’s going to be dictated by how cheap it is, and whether it destroys jobs or creates jobs — it does not necessarily have to destroy jobs at all — that is going to be the driving imperative, and I think that race is already underway,” Broadman said.
Ahead of the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, U.K. in June, Broadman, an assistant U.S. trade representative during the Clinton administration, said the group of major economies will need to drastically evolve their research and development and sovereign-to-sovereign science and technology collaborations in order to compete with China.
Broadman is pushing for an “R&D7” to be included on the G-7 agenda, similar to other working groups across members on issues of global importance. Its aim would be to reform the structure underlying the negotiation and execution of international science and technology agreements among G-7 countries. It would also form a stand-alone body tasked with ensuring that these agreements strengthen and recalibrate R&D collaboration within the G-7.
“We’ve done really well among democratic countries collaborating on investment and trade, but we’ve done an extraordinarily poor job in R&D, and this is where China is frankly a huge competitive and potentially a huge economic and maybe geopolitical, threat,” he said.
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