Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Frank Jotzo, ANU
At the Pittsburgh G20 meeting, Indonesia’s President Yudhoyono (SBY) reportedly said that Indonesia had decided on a national climate change action plan ‘that will reduce our emissions by 26 per cent by 2020 from BAU (Business As Usual)’, and by up to 41 per cent with international support.
This would be a substantial reduction, including in global terms.
Author: Peter Drysdale
Last week China celebrated the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic and the installation of the Chinese Communist Party government. During the week we ran a number of essays reflecting on the impact of these events over the subsequent sixty years on China and around the world. In today’s feature Yiping Huang underlines the economic achievements of the past thirty years, wrought by the introduction of free markets in goods and services following thirty years of economic control and command. But the legacy of control and command, he reminds us, still limits the achievement of China’s full economic potential, through the distortions it continues to impose on the operation of the country’s factor markets – the markets for labour, capital, land and energy. Read more…
Author: Yiping Huang, Peking University and ANU
When Mao Zedong arrived in Beijing sixty years ago with his comrades from Yan-an, a remote town in Northwestern Shaan-xi province, he probably did not intend to ban free markets across the country. The socialist transformation began when Mao set his eyes on overtaking the United States. This was to be achieved, according to him, through the development of heavy industries, especially the steel industry.
The central planning system was established to maximize urban industrialization, but the development of urban industries required funding. Read more…
Author: Nabeel Mancheri, Hiroshima University
The recently released new five-year national Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) of India has set a few objectives.
Given the current financial crisis, it is also intended to provide a confidence boost for the export market. Its objectives are ambitious. Fiscal incentives, institutional changes, procedural rationalisation, and enhanced market access across the world, as well as the diversification of export markets are the trust areas mentioned in the document.
Author: Vani Archana, ICRIER
India has recently signed a free trade area (FTA) agreement with the ASEAN nations (Brunei, Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand). The agreement allows for the reduction of tariffs on so-called highly sensitive items, and special products including palm oil, pepper, coffee and black tea by 2019. Tariff rates on sensitive items with the five ASEAN member states most important to India’s trade system will be reduced gradually until 2016. Tariff rates on Normal Track 1 items will be reduced, and finally eliminated, by 2013, and by 2016 for Normal Track 2 items. Other countries in ASEAN like Cambodia and Myanmar receive three to five years longer to achieve the same tariff goals. There is also an exclusion list, which will be reviewed every year.
Author: Tobias Harris
David Brooks’s latest column in the New York Times calls for a restoration of ‘economic values’ in the United States, with the aim of making ‘the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy.’ Brooks sees a decline in traditional values of restraint behind the rise of consumer spending to ever greater portions of GDP and the growing indebtedness of consumers.
Whether or not the emergence of the US as a consumer economy is a function of declining values, greater restraint by US consumers is the flip side of Japanese consumers spending more of hoarded savings. After all, the growth of the US consumer economy was accompanied by global imbalances, and massive current account surpluses by countries like Japan.
Author: Stanley Lubman, Berkeley
China has come a long way in creating a legal system—and has a long way to go if the avowed aim of ‘ruling the country by law’ is to be realized. At the same time, considering that legal development has really been carried out for only half of the time that has elapsed since the founding of the People’s Republic, the accomplishments are considerable.
What remains in doubt is the depth of the commitment of the current Chinese leadership to further develop key institutions, and whether Chinese society will be stable enough to nourish those institutions.
Author: William O’Chee, former Senator
For some time commentators have been discussing how the rise of China will change the Asia-Pacific region, but that may be less significant than how China’s involvement in the region, and the greater world, will change China.
China as a rising regional power will transform the politics, and also the economy, of the Asia-Pacific. But this region has actually been in post-colonial flux for some time. In fact, there may be an argument that the seeming stability of American hegemony has been but a passing interlude on the way to something else.
Author: Tobias Harris
In his first two weeks as prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio ought to have learned an important lesson about governing: if you do not set the agenda, someone else will. With the LDP focused on electing a new leader, the policy agenda was clearly set by Kamei Shizuka, trying to make the best of the poor hand dealt to him by the new government. While the government’s agenda is packed, the question of a moratorium on loan repayments for small- and medium-sized enterprises is clearly at the top of the list.
Speaking at a press conference following the first meeting of the government’s Basic Policy Cabinet Committee — comprised of Kamei, Consumer Affairs minister Fukushima Mizuho, and Deputy Prime Minister Kan Naoto — Kamei insisted that he has Hatoyama’s backing Read more…
Author: Jerome A Cohen, NYU
In a bold reflection of their revolutionary zeal, when China’s Communists established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, they totally rejected the legal regime of their Kuomintang predecessors that had been at least nominally grounded in European law. Sun Yat-sen had been more practical when he established the Republic of China after the 1911 Revolution. His new government decided to use what it could from the previous regime and benefit from the considerable Western-influenced law reform effort that had been made by the Manchu (Qing) dynasty for more than a decade before its collapse. Even Lenin opted for as much legal continuity as possible between the Czarist government and its Bolshevik successor, preferring to add socialist flourishes to the impressive pre-1917 Russian law codes that had been imported from Western Europe half a century earlier, deleting as necessary rather than starting from scratch.