About MacroPolo

MacroPolo

MacroPolo is the digital publication and research platform of MacroPolo, the in-house think tank of the Paulson Institute in Chicago. It was launched to decode China's economic arrival for a global audience, publishing incisive, market-relevant analysis and creative, interactive research products on China's political economy. Its work spans three core areas — economics, technology and politics — and covers macroeconomic policy, economic reform, urbanisation, state-owned enterprises, fiscal and tax policy, energy, and cross-border investment. Rather than issuing long conventional research papers, MacroPolo specialises in thoughtfully designed digital interactives, dynamic content and databases, building what it calls a truly twenty-first-century think tank. Although based in Chicago in the United States, its subject is China, and it belongs in this China online news and analysis category as one of the most distinctive English-language platforms devoted to understanding the Chinese economy. It is not affiliated with, supported by, or connected to any government.

The Paulson Institute

MacroPolo's parent is the Paulson Institute, founded in 2011 by former United States Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. The Institute is a non-partisan, independent, privately funded think and do tank, based in Chicago with offices in Washington and Beijing, dedicated to fostering a US-China relationship that serves to maintain global order in a rapidly evolving world. Within that structure, MacroPolo serves as the Institute's think tank and publishing arm for China analysis: the place where research fellows and creators turn datasets and field knowledge into public-facing digital products. The Institute describes itself as not supported by or connected to any government, a point MacroPolo repeats in its own publications. This institutional home gives MacroPolo both its mission — improving understanding of China's rise and of US-China dynamics — and its audience of business leaders, policymakers, investors and journalists who follow that relationship professionally.

Founding and leadership

MacroPolo was co-founded by Damien Ma, who served as its founding managing director and built the venture from the ground up. Ma is an analyst of China's political economy, technology and energy sectors with two decades of work at the intersection of markets, policy and global affairs. Before MacroPolo he helped build and lead the China practice at Eurasia Group, the political risk research and advisory firm, and he has served as adjunct faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, teaching in its global experiential education programme, as well as teaching graduate students at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is the author or editor of several books on China, including In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China's Ascent in the Next Decade, The Economics of Air Pollution in China, and China's Economic Arrival: Decoding a Disruptive Rise — the last title supplying the phrase, decoding China's economic arrival, that became MacroPolo's own tagline. In December 2025 Ma left to become Director and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair of Carnegie China, the Carnegie Endowment's East Asia-based research centre in Singapore, having led MacroPolo through its first seven years and its best-known research launches; he remains a senior advisor to firms including Gavekal and Aurora Macro Strategies. Colleagues central to its products have included research fellow Houze Song, who co-authored its supply chain work, and fellow Matt Sheehan, who led its artificial intelligence talent research.

A digital-first publishing model

What sets MacroPolo apart from older think tanks is form as much as content. Its own description, repeated across its publications, states that instead of long research papers it specialises in thoughtfully designed digital interactives as well as dynamic content and databases, delivered by a small team of experts and creators. In practice this means scrollytelling features, interactive maps and charts, searchable trackers and digital books that let readers explore the underlying data themselves. The model suits its subjects: questions such as where the world's top AI researchers are educated and employed, or how global supply chains are being reassembled, are inherently spatial and quantitative, and MacroPolo's products present them visually rather than burying findings in PDF annexes. Its website, macropolo.org, functions accordingly as an online magazine and research platform — publishing analysis articles alongside flagship interactive projects — rather than as a static institutional brochure. Job notices for its research fellowships emphasise joining a small but experienced and dedicated team building analytical products, data-driven research and other digital content, underlining that production craft is part of the research itself.

The Global AI Talent Tracker

MacroPolo's most influential product is the Global AI Talent Tracker, launched on 9 June 2020. The tracker is a data-driven study of the global balance and movement of top scientists in artificial intelligence, built originally by Matt Sheehan and Ishan Banerjee from a distinctive dataset: the authors of papers accepted to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS), one of the largest, most popular and most selective venues in AI research. For each top-tier researcher, the team traced where they earned their undergraduate degree, where they went for graduate study, and where they are currently employed. The 2020 findings showed that movement then favoured the United States: nearly thirty percent of top AI researchers had earned their undergraduate degrees in China — the largest single source — yet the United States was their leading destination for graduate study and work. Building on MacroPolo analysis from 2018 and 2019, the tracker gave policymakers a quantified picture of national AI capability at a moment when governments were competing for talent. A major update, Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0, followed in March 2024 using NeurIPS 2022 data — a record 2,671 accepted papers at a 25.6 percent acceptance rate, against 1,428 papers in 2019. It found the United States still the top destination for top-tier talent, with researchers of American and Chinese undergraduate origin together comprising 75 percent of top-tier AI talent in US institutions, up from 58 percent in 2019, while the share of top researchers working outside their home country fell by thirteen percentage points, indicating more elite talent staying home.

Supply Chain Jigsaw and other flagship products

MacroPolo's other signature format is the digital book, exemplified by Supply Chain Jigsaw: Piecing Together the Future Global Economy, published in April 2020 and authored by Damien Ma, Houze Song and Neil Thomas. The project examined how supply chains centred on China were being reconfigured by trade tensions, rising costs and strategic competition, presenting its argument through an interactive digital format rather than a printed volume. Its ChinAI project similarly mapped China's AI ecosystem, assembling datasets on Chinese AI companies, investors and talent — including rankings of top Chinese universities in AI research and the career paths of Microsoft Research Asia fellows who went on to found or lead firms such as SenseTime and Horizon Robotics — and publishing much of its underlying data openly in the spirit of transparency. Across such products, a consistent method is visible: define a consequential question about China's economy, build an original dataset from public sources, and present the result as an explorable digital artefact that other researchers, journalists and decision-makers can cite and reuse.

Coverage: economics, technology and politics

Day to day, MacroPolo publishes analysis across the breadth of China's political economy. In economics, its work addresses macroeconomic policy and reform, the fiscal and tax relationship between central and local government, urbanisation, state-owned enterprises and the property and local-debt questions that shape China's growth model. In technology, beyond the talent tracker, it analyses China's innovation system, its technology companies and the geopolitics of semiconductors and digital platforms. In politics, it examines how policy is made and how political incentives drive economic outcomes — a theme Ma has emphasised in arguing that China's economy cannot be understood independently of its politics, since the political system shapes what Chinese companies can do and what markets can expect. Energy and environment form a further strand, growing from the founders' earlier work on air pollution economics, and cross-border investment — Chinese capital abroad and foreign capital in China — runs through much of the output. Events and multimedia extend the publishing: Paulson Institute sessions such as Decoding China discussions with Ma and Song walking audiences through what is actually happening in the Chinese economy, and frequent media appearances, including Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast discussing the AI talent data.

Audience and influence

MacroPolo writes for the professional China audience: investors and executives allocating capital, officials and staff shaping policy, journalists covering business and geopolitics, and scholars of contemporary China. Its influence is measurable in the afterlife of its products: the Global AI Talent Tracker became a standard citation in debates over US-China technology competition, quoted by major newspapers and invoked in policy discussion about research security, visas and industrial strategy; a 2025 Carnegie study revisiting its cohort of top Chinese researchers drew headlines years after the original launch. That citation power reflects the scarcity of what MacroPolo supplies — original, transparent, China-specific datasets in English, presented accessibly. Where much commentary on China's economy is opinion or aggregation, MacroPolo's contribution is evidence packaged for use, which is why its releases are covered by the Paulson Institute as news events in their own right, with statements from Institute chairman Henry Paulson on their policy implications.

Position and significance

MacroPolo occupies a particular niche in the English-language China information ecosystem. It is neither a newsroom chasing daily headlines nor a university centre publishing for peers; it is a market-relevant analysis platform that treats design and data as editorial values. Its Chicago base, inside an institute founded by a former US Treasury Secretary who dealt extensively with Beijing, places it at the centre of the US-China policy conversation, while its subject matter, methods and much of its expertise are devoted to China itself — the framing under which it is recorded in the WorldNM directory's China online news listings for this round. Its first seven years, celebrated by the Institute in 2024 alongside a redesigned website and the annual release of its talent tracker, established a durable model: small team, digital-native formats, and flagship datasets that remain reference points long after publication. As US-China economic interdependence and rivalry continue to define global markets, MacroPolo's work of decoding China's economic arrival remains directly relevant to the business, policy and technology audiences it set out to serve.