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This Spring SMU and the George W. Bush Presidential Center announced the creation of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. The new Initiative represents an exciting new partnership between SMU’s Department of Economics and the Bush Institute, the public policy arm of the Bush Center.

The mission of the Initiative is to advance policy ideas to promote economic growth and opportunity in this country and around the world. The Initiative combines the Bush Institute’s pre-existing Economic Growth Initiative with the economic policy work of scholars in SMU’s Department of Economics and other parts of the University.

The Initiative’s leadership team consists of Managing Director Matthew Rooney, who came to the Bush Center from approximately three decades in the U.S. State Department; Director J.H. Cullum Clark, who earned his Ph.D. in Economics at SMU in 2017 after 25 years in the investment industry and continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Economics at SMU; and Deputy Director Laura Collins, who previously worked at the American Action Forum, a prominent Washington, D.C. think tank, and as a practicing attorney.

From the point of view of SMU, the new partnership will advance the University’s strategic goal of building a stronger policy voice on pressing issues of our time at the local, national, and global levels, as well as the effort by the Department of Economics to showcase the work of SMU economists and further the research mission of what is already one of the most productive economics research programs in the country.

The partnership will also advance the Bush Institute’s goal of broadening and deepening its policy work, widening the range of issues the Bush institute addresses and bringing additional intellectual depth to its work through close collaboration with a leading research university. The Bush Institute’s economic policy team is already a recognized national voice on international trade and immigration policy. The new partnership strengthens these programs and advances the Bush Institute’s plans to address a number of domestic economic policy issues as well.

The Initiative is already off to a very productive start. Since the start of the Fall term, the Initiative has hosted Dr. Mary Lovely, a leading authority on U.S.-Chinese economic relations at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Syracuse University, as its inaugural Visiting Fellow. Other guests have included Robert Zoellick, former Deputy Secretary of State and World Bank President, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and chief economic advisor to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The Initiative has featured the work of SMU economists Klaus Desmet and James Lake in Bush Center publications, and has plans to showcase the research of numerous other SMU scholars in coming months. And the Initiative is planning a symposium on “Policies to Promote Inclusive Urban Growth” at the Bush Center on January 31, 2019, which will feature experts from both the Bush Center and SMU alongside a variety of former national and local policymakers and front-line business, non-profit, and think tank leaders engaged in housing and urban revitalization.