The Spring 2026 issue of Insights @ CEM examines how emerging markets engage with shifting global pressures, from foreign investment and trade rules to sustainability demands and long-run development tradeoffs.
A fresh look at China's Belt and Road Initiative challenges its infrastructure-building image, finding that acquisitions dominate over greenfield projects. A study of India's pharmaceutical sector shows how firms and policymakers transformed a major disruption, the 1995 TRIPS Agreement, into a platform for global leadership in generic medicines. Other briefs explore how corruption and tariffs undermine corporate sustainability commitments, how multinationals can help close the climate finance gap, and why voluntary sustainability standards spread further where local institutions are already strong.
This issue also features a special Author's Voice piece drawn from a conversation held at CEM this past March with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. Their exchange traces India's post-independence development arc, making a provocative case that the country's early embrace of democracy was both its greatest stabilizing force and a source of real constraints on economic transformation.
Together, these pieces show that the distance between potential and outcome depends not on resources alone, but on how effectively countries and firms respond to constraint, competition, and change.