Steve Suranovic

Steve Suranovic is an associate professor of economics and international affairs at the George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC. He has a PhD in economics from Cornell University and a BS in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been teaching international trade and finance for more than twenty years at GW and as an adjunct for Cornell University’s Washington, DC, program. In fall 2002, he taught at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, as a visiting Fulbright lecturer. He has taught a GW class at Fudan University in Shanghai during the summers of 2009 and 2010. He has also spoken to business, government, and academic audiences in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, China, and Mongolia as part of the U.S. State Department speaker’s programs.

His research focuses on two areas: international trade policy and behavioral economics. With respect to behavior, he examines why people choose to do things that many observers view as irrational. Examples include addiction to cigarettes, cyclical dieting, and anorexia. His research shows that dangerous behaviors can be explained as the outcome of a reasoned and rational optimization exercise. With respect to trade policy, his research seeks to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of arguments supporting various policy options. The goal is to answer the question, what trade policies should a country implement? More generally, he applies the economic analytical method to identify the policies that can attract the most widespread support.

His book A Moderate Compromise: Economic Policy Choice in an Era of Globalization will be released by Palgrave Macmillan in fall 2010. In it he offers a critique of current methods to evaluate and choose policies and suggests a simple, principled, and moderate alternative.