Author: Kirill Nourzhanov, ANU

Premiers are hired and fired all the time in the Kyrgyz Republic. On 21 October, following the resignation of the entire cabinet, Daniyar Usenov became the country’s seventeenth prime minister in its eighteen years of independence. In the past, incompetence, corruption scandals, suspected power ambitions, or merely the President’s whim served as pretexts for government reshuffles. This time the situation appears to be more complex and fraught.

The cabinet’s resignation came after weeks of rumours and media leaks about President Kurmanbek Bakiev’s plans to overhaul the entire executive branch of government. Read more…

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan

There is no single Japanese government vision of how regional community building should proceed.

First there is the ‘Hatoyama vision’ of an East Asia Community (EAC). This has long been one of the prime minister’s pet projects. In his 2005 book, he outlined his desire to promote a plan for a European style East Asia Community and to play the leading role in promoting it. He primarily envisions the building of an economic community with regional economic integration as a possible end point. Read more…

Author: Mohammed Saqib, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, New Delhi

India is currently the world’s fourth largest economy in terms of real GDP (PPP) and the tenth largest economy in terms of nominal GDP. Over the last decade, the country has emerged as a leading actor on the international stage. The outsourcing of services to India has over the past decade redefined the international business environment, and major Indian companies are now moving abroad on a scale never before witnessed.

In a situation where the world requires innovative companies to address the serious global challenges faced by humanity, including high resource consumption, pollution, population growth, demographic and geopolitical changes, India, with its rapidly changing business environment, may indeed prove to be one of the most important countries. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris

The day of Barack Obama’s first visit to Japan is approaching rapidly and the focus of the allies remains on the future of Futenma and the US-Japan agreement on the realignment of US forces in Japan.

The Hatoyama government is still weighing its options — and Prime Minister Hatoyama has said on more than one occasion that his government will not be treating Obama’s visit as a firm deadline for coming up with an alternative to the status quo agreement. Read more…

Author: Chalongphob Sussangkarn, TDRI

East Asian economies should push ahead with Financial Cooperation measures initiated in response to the 1997/98 crisis, as well as other cooperation measures in direct response to the current sub-prime crisis. These measures will facilitate the ability of countries in the region to shore up their economies in the short-term, their growth path to be less dependent on exports as the main growth engine in the medium term, and strengthen the region’s economic and financial resiliency and protect itself from future crises in the medium to long term.

It is now clear that the indirect impacts of the sub-prime crisis on the region through the trade channel will be very severe. Read more…

Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University and Meiji University

At the fourth East Asian Summit, held on 25 October in Thailand, the leaders of Japan and Australia had the opportunity to air their ideas about the future form and function of East Asian regionalism.

As Acharya notes Australian PM Rudd and Japanese PM Hatoyama appear to have competing visions about how to re-order the region. But, at this stage, if only because both proposals share a level of deliberately in-built vagueness, it’s not easy to tell. Hatoyama, for example, seems ambivalent – or at least unsure – on what role the US ought to play in the region. Read more…

Author: Gary Hawke, NZIER

The fourth bilateral meetings of prime ministers Rudd and Key in Canberra at the end of August can now be seen in some kind of perspective. Any pay-off lies in the future and has to be worked for.

Much of the immediate attention was focused on the defence area. The wording of the joint statement by the prime ministers is intriguingly opaque. The list of items to which ‘both governments would bring sustained focus to making new progress’ includes:

‘ongoing close defence relations to promote common regional security objectives, including, exploring possible opportunities to enhance our joint operational capabilities reinvigorating the ANZAC spirit.’

Read more…

Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU

Australia is not the only country on the receiving end of China’s new-found diplomatic ‘forthrightness’. India too has recently received a sizzling serve from the Beijing end of the court.

As pointed out in South Asia Masala, the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is also claimed by China, is the current immovable object in the Sino-Indian relationship. However, on this occasion that tricky problem has been exacerbated by a planned visit of the Dalai Lama to the disputed state and to Tawang, birth-place of the revered Sixth Dalai Lama, which lies within the borders claimed by India. Read more…

Author: Razeen Sally, ECIPE

This is the season for regional-integration initiatives in Asia. Two new initiatives were tabled at the East Asia Summit in Hua Hin. The new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, wants an East Asian Community. The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has proposed an Asia Pacific Community.

Both ideas seek to further regional economic integration, but their membership and content remain unspecified. There is talk of folding the ‘noodle bowl’ of free trade agreements (FTAs) in Asia into region-wide FTAs: a Northeast Asian FTA, comprising China, South Korea and Japan; an ASEAN Plus Three (APT) FTA that would unite northeast and southeast Asia; and an ASEAN Plus Six FTA that would subsume APT and India, Australia and New Zealand. There are also east-Asian initiatives on financial and monetary cooperation. Read more…

Author: Hal Hill and Chris Manning, ANU

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (universally known as SBY) announced the cabinet for his second five-year term shortly after his inauguration on October 20. Its composition and quality provide one of the best indications of the president’s policy priorities, as well as his political strategy.

SBY’s Democrat Party emerged as the major, though minority, party at the April parliamentary polls, while he had a resounding victory in the July presidential election. He is therefore in a much stronger position than in 2004. In May, he made a surprising choice of Dr Boediono as his vice presidential running mate, a ‘non-politician’, a respected economic policy maker (and also an Australian graduate). Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale

We are now more than a year into the global financial crisis, or the Great Crash of 2008 as Ross Garnaut describes it in the timely and important book he has written with David Llewellyn-Smith, launched by the Australian Prime Minister in Canberra last week and dissected in a forum at the ANU a little while before. The book provides everyman’s guide to how the global financial crisis happened and what lessons we might take away from what was a very scary experience. This week’s lead describes the nature of the beast, as Garnaut sees it. Three things stand out about the Crash of 2008. Read more…

This article is the first part of a digest of a public forum at the ANU.

There has been quite a bit written, including several books, on the Great Crash of 2008. Reading those all at once recalls the old Indian story of the blind men and the elephant: one blind man putting his arms around the legs described the elephant as a tree, another feeling the ear described it as a fan. One felt the trunk and described it as a snake, while a fourth felt the tail and disputed the serpentine explanation. The Great Crash of 2008 is the story of the whole elephant. It tries to show how all the parts fit together. Read more…