China Balance Sheet - About the Organizations

Organizations

The Center for Strategic and International Studies

CSIS seeks to advance global security and prosperity in an era of economic and political transformation by providing strategic insights and practical policy solutions to decision makers. CSIS serves as a strategic planning partner for government by conducting research and analysis and developing policy initiatives that look into the future and anticipate change.

Founded in 1962 by David M. Abshire and Admiral Arleigh Burke, CSIS is a bipartisan, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. with more than 220 full-time staff and a large network of affiliated experts. Former U.S. senator Sam Nunn became chairman of the CSIS Board of Trustees in 1999, and John J. Hamre has led CSIS as its president and chief executive officer since April 2000.

CSIS experts conduct research and analysis and develop policy initiatives that are organized around more than 25 programs grouped under three themes: defense and security; global challenges; and regional transformation.

With one of the most comprehensive programs on U.S. defense policy and international security, CSIS proposes reforms to U.S. defense organization, security policy, and the defense industrial and technology base. Other CSIS programs offer solutions to the challenges of proliferation, transnational terrorism, homeland security, and post-conflict reconstruction.

With programs on demographics and population, energy security, global health, technology, and the international financial and economic system, CSIS addresses the new drivers of risk and opportunity on the world stage.

Finally, CSIS is the only institution of its kind with resident experts studying the transformation of all of the world's major geographic regions. CSIS specialists seek to anticipate changes in key countries and regions–from Africa to Asia, from Europe to Latin America, and from the Middle East to North America.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics

The Institute is the only major research institution in the United States devoted to international economic issues. Since 1981, the Institute has provided timely, objective analysis and concrete solutions to key international economic problems. It has been called “the most influential think tank on the planet.”

The Institute attempts to anticipate emerging issues and to be ready with practical ideas to inform and shape public debate. Its audience includes government officials and legislators, business and labor leaders, management and staff at international organizations, university-based scholars and their students, other research institutions and nongovernmental organizations, the media, and the public at large. It addresses these groups both in the United States and around the world.

The Institute's staff of about 50 includes more than two dozen researchers, who are conducting about 30 studies at any given time. Its agenda emphasizes global macroeconomic topics, international money and finance, trade and related social issues, investment, and the international implications of new technologies. Current priority is attached to China, globalization and the backlash against it, outsourcing, reform of the international financial architecture, and new trade negotiations at the multilateral, regional, and bilateral levels. Institute staff and research cover all key regions—especially Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America as well as the United States itself. In late 2001, the Institute helped create the Center for Global Development to address poverty and development issues in the poor countries. Dr. C. Fred Bergsten has been director of the Institute throughout its initial quarter century.

Institute studies have helped provide the intellectual foundation for many of the major international financial initiatives of the past two decades: reform of the IMF, adoption of international banking standards, exchange rate systems in the G-7 and emerging-market economies, policies toward the dollar and the euro as well as the Chinese renminbi and other Asian currencies, and responses to debt and currency crises. The Institute has made important contributions to key trade policy decisions, including fast-track legislation and related Trade Adjustment Assistance reforms, the Doha and Uruguay Rounds and the development of the WTO, NAFTA and other US free trade agreements, APEC and East Asian regionalism, a series of United States–Japan negotiations, reform of sanctions policy, liberalization of US export controls and export credits, and specific measures such as PNTR for China in 2000 and the abolition of special protection for steel in 2004. Other influential analyses have addressed economic reform in Europe, Latin America and Japan, globalization and policy responses to it, outsourcing, energy policy, electronic commerce, corruption, foreign direct investment both into and out of the United States, global warming and international environmental policy, and key sectors such as agriculture, financial services, steel, telecommunications, and textiles.