Author: Editorial Board, ANU It is hard to imagine a more thorough stress test for globalisation than the double whammy of a once-in-a-century global pandemic followed in short order by a land war between two of the world’s major commodity producers. The COVID-19 recession was one of the most unusual in modern economic history. Central...
Author: Jayant Menon, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute The resilience of global supply chains in manufacturing has been under scrutiny following COVID-19 and geopolitical shocks. Global supply chains are robust or resilient when they can sustain economic shocks and continue producing an unchanged level of output. The operational and locational dimensions of resilience need to be appreciated...
Author: Yasuyuki Todo, Waseda University Global supply chains are being reorganised as Western countries attempt to decouple from the Chinese economy and firms are increasingly aware of the risks of supply chain disruption after COVID-19-related lockdowns. Many countries have implemented policies to support the restructuring of global supply chains and Japan is no exception. In...
Authors: Helani Galpaya and Ramathi Bandaranayake, LIRNEasia Having stagnated for years, the percentage of South Asians who have used the internet has finally reached 50 per cent. In South Asia internet use is synonymous with social media, with most users spending all their time on chat applications. Many of these users have low digital skills...
Author: Younus Mushtaq Ahmed, University of British Columbia In 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India had achieved Open Defecation Free (ODF) status after his government built over 110 million toilets. The federal government’s flagship program, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), was the largest sanitation intervention of its kind globally. Its...
Author: Ke Li, City University of New York Weeks into 2022, a short video showing a Chinese woman with her neck chained to a village hut in the city of Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province in freezing temperatures went viral on the internet. Local authorities later confirmed her status as a victim of human trafficking — and...
Author: Giulia Ajmone Marsan, ERIA The economic dynamism of ASEAN is well-known and in recent years the region has seen the emergence of some of the fastest growing digital economies in the world. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend, with 60 million new digital consumers since the pandemic started and the internet economy on track...
Author: James Laurenceson, UTS Whether fully intended or not, Australian trade policy is embracing a theatrical element that serves to lock in the country’s long-term interests. Canberra enthusiastically touts deals that have obvious potential to diversify trade away from China, including the Australia–UK Free Trade Agreement (FTA) struck in December 2021 and the Australia–India Economic...
Authors: Aidan Arasasingham and Emily Benson, CSIS On 23 May 2022, US President Joe Biden and 12 regional counterparts officially launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF). After almost five years since the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the IPEF aims to reassert US regional economic engagement and provide a US-led...
Authors: Hannah Elyse Sworn and Manoj Harjani, NTU Intellectual property (IP) has long been a sore point in relations between Washington and Beijing. US officials have repeatedly targeted China for widespread counterfeiting since its economic ‘opening up’ in the late 1970s. But after enduring a punishing series of legal reforms to join the World Trade...