Daniel
Trefler
J. Douglas and Ruth Grant Chair
in Competitiveness and ProsperityRotman School of Management
University of Toronto
Throughout my career, I have been fixated on a single question: what determines whether trade and new technologies such as AI generate broad-based prosperity or instead concentrate economic and political power?
I am a Professor at the University of Toronto and the J. Douglas and Ruth Grant Chair in Competitiveness and Prosperity at the Rotman School of Management. I am an international trade economist whose work extends into innovation and AI.
My research has shaped the textbook understanding of international trade, giving us a coherent account of the relationships among trade patterns, technology differences across countries, and the winners and losers from trade agreements. Over the past decade, I have extended this research agenda to AI—using AI intensively in my own research and studying how it is reshaping international trade and society.
I have advised successive Canadian governments on trade, productivity and innovation; Global Affairs Canada on CETA, CUSMA and Canada’s economic relationships with the United States and China; the Bank of Canada on trade; and the WTO on industrial policy reform and the international governance of AI.
Trade, AI and broad-based prosperity
Canada and more than 100 other countries are caught between two great powers.
I use my experience to advise governments and international organizations on the policy choices that direct trade and AI in ways that generate rather than erode broad-based prosperity.
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