Independent research, policy, and strategy to defend national economies from corporate globalization.
Founded in 2011 by former WTO trade negotiators and United States congressional staffers, the Institute supplies the empirical case and the strategic framework that anti‑globalization legislators, unions, and local‑industry advocates rely upon when they contest trade agreements, offshoring, and supranational corporate power.
Why we were founded in 2011 — and why our independence is structural, not rhetorical.
The Institute was convened in Washington in the autumn of 2011 by a small group of former trade negotiators from the World Trade Organization, paired with senior staffers from the United States Senate and House committees that oversee commerce, ways and means, and foreign affairs. Each of the founders had spent the previous decade inside the architecture of the trade‑liberalization consensus — and each had concluded that the evidentiary base on which those agreements rested was, at best, incomplete.
The premise was deliberately narrow. The Institute would not advocate for or against any administration, sign any joint declaration with a foreign ministry, or accept funding from any corporation whose interests touched the questions under study. It would produce the data, the policy briefs, and the strategic frameworks that elected officials, trade unions, and local‑industry associations could cite when they challenged the premises of offshoring, investor‑state dispute settlement, and the steady transfer of legislative competence to supranational bodies.
Thirteen years on, that premise has hardened into an operating discipline. The Institute is funded entirely by its 14,200 individual members and three vetted private foundations — a no‑corporate‑donor policy that is audited annually and disclosed in every quarterly filing. No government, no political party, and no firm with a stake in the policy outcomes the Institute analyzes has ever written a check. The constraint is not a posture; it is the condition under which the research is permitted to say what it says.
— The Office of the Director, Washington D.C.
A documented record, 2011–2024.
Fourteen years of published research, parliamentary citation, and peer review. The timeline below tracks the milestones that have shaped the Institute’s standing with legislators across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Hungary.
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2011 Autumn
Founding of the Institute in Washington, D.C.
A cohort of former WTO trade negotiators and U.S. congressional staffers convenes with an explicit no-corporate-donor charter and a mandate to build the empirical case against the bipartisan trade-liberalization consensus.
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2014 Spring
Launch of the Offshoring Impact Database.
The world’s largest open-access longitudinal dataset on offshoring’s wage and employment impact goes live, initially covering 23 countries with industrial data back to 1995. The dataset now covers 41 countries and is cited in working papers across four continents.
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2023 November
Adoption of the “Sovereignty First” Framework.
Three governing parties in Europe formally adopt the Institute’s Sovereignty First framework as their 2023 policy backbone on trade, industrial strategy, and migration. The framework moves from research output to governing document within fourteen months of publication.
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2024 October
2024 Hayek Foundation Award · 142nd Policy Brief Published.
The Institute is awarded the 2024 Hayek Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Policy. The same quarter marks the release of its 142nd published policy brief and the opening of the Sydney office — the fourth permanent bureau after Washington, London, and Budapest.
Thirty-eight researchers in four offices, answering to fourteen thousand members — and to no corporation.
Research Staff & Offices
The Institute maintains a research staff of 38 analysts, economists, and former policymakers distributed across four offices: Washington D.C., London, Budapest, and Sydney. The staff includes former WTO negotiators, ex-congressional and parliamentary staffers, trade economists trained at Cambridge, the LSE, Bocconi, and Humboldt, and a small data-engineering unit that maintains the Offshoring Impact Database.
- Washington D.C. — Headquarters · 1100 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 750
- London — United Kingdom & Commonwealth program
- Budapest — Central European & Visegrád program
- Sydney — Indo-Pacific industrial policy program
The Funding Discipline
The Institute accepts no corporate donations. No funding is received from any government or political party. Operating revenue is drawn from two sources: individual subscriptions from 14,200+ members across 47 countries, and grants from three vetted private foundations whose boards have been screened for conflicts of interest with the industries under study. The policy is audited annually and disclosed in every quarterly filing.
| Source | Share of Operating Revenue |
|---|---|
| 14,200 individual member subscriptions | ~78% |
| Three vetted private foundations | ~22% |
| Corporate donors | 0.0% |
| Governments or political parties | 0.0% |
By the numbers, as of January 2025.
“The first duty of a sovereign legislature is to make the law that its constituents can live under. The Sovereignty First framework begins from that premise and works backward — identifying, for every question of trade, industrial policy, and migration, the smallest set of supranational commitments that a national parliament must be willing to relinquish in order to legislate as its voters expect.”