Author: Mahendra Ved, New Delhi
While the Indian car sector is travelling in the fast lane, road and public transport projects have not kept pace. Indians bought about 2.5 million cars last year, worth US$30 billion, while another half a million were exported.
This year, assuming that car-loan rates decline and the economy improves, the market could grow by 10 to 12 per cent — and even if rates remain static, the car market will still grow by 5 to 7 per cent. Read more…
Author: Mark Carroll, Australian-Thai Chamber of Commerce
The muddy floodwaters in Thailand having receded, one of the truths to emerge will be just how important the Thai economy is in both regional and global terms.
Thailand is a manufacturing powerhouse. Countless small and large factories churn out a broad range of finished consumer goods for export, as well as component products vital to global supply chains. Read more…
Author: Abdur Chowdhury, Marquette University
Joining the WTO in 2012 marks the culmination of a long period of transformation for Russia, which first applied for membership in June 1993, and finally had its terms of entry accepted on 16 December.
To join the WTO, Russia has had to overhaul its national laws to bring them into conformity with the global trade regime, and work out bilateral market-opening deals with all other members. Russia has agreed to slash tariffs, get rid of industrial subsidies and allow foreign companies greater access to its domestic market. Read more…
Author: Vikas Kumar, Azim Premji University
India’s decision against allowing FDI in the retail sector has evoked strong reactions. According to the Indian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce (PSCC), this sector accounts for about 10 per cent of GDP and is the second-largest employer after agriculture.
It employs about 40 million people (8 per cent of the workforce) and thereby affects as much as one-sixth of India’s population. This sector absorbs large numbers of unemployed youth, particularly in towns and cities, by offering them entrepreneurial opportunities. Read more…
Author: Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Columbia University and CFR
As if undermining the WTO’s Doha Round of global free-trade talks was not bad enough (the last ministerial meeting in Geneva produced barely a squeak), the US has compounded its folly by actively promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
President Barack Obama announced this with nine Asian countries during his recent trip to the region. Read more…
Author: Wendy Dobson, University of Toronto
The euro crisis hijacked the G20 Summit in Cannes — even by late December Europe’s leaders still had not fully diagnosed the problem, but without an accurate diagnosis how can there be an effective prescription?
This missing link accentuates two challenges that Asian integration will face in 2012: the consolidation of regional architecture and the need for deeper structural adjustments. Read more…
Author: Boris Kheyfets, Russian Academy of Sciences
Russia’s bid to join the WTO was approved on 16 December at long last. This event marked the end of some of the longest negotiations in WTO history, with Russia making its initial decision to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — the precursor to the WTO — in 1993.
But despite the decision to join, domestic debate about the appropriateness of Russia’s membership continues unabated. Read more…
Authors: Prema-chandra Athukorala, ANU; and Archanun Kohpaiboon, Thammasat University
The proliferation of FTAs over the past two decades has sparked a debate in Australian and international policy forums about their implications for the operation of the global trading system and ways of mitigating likely discriminatory effects on both partners and non-signatory countries.
An examination of the impact of the Australia–Thailand free trade agreement (TAFTA) of January 2005 on trade between the two countries provides valuable input into this debate. Read more…
Author: Evan A. Feigenbaum, CFR
Politicians in landlocked countries aim to foster balance among the larger countries on whom their economies depend for transit.
But with so many obstacles to continental trade and transit in Central Asia, is the effort worth the exertion? Read more…
Authors: Malcolm Bosworth and Greg Cutbush, ANU Enterprise
Like all good fairytales, APEC was formed ‘once upon a time’ to promote trade and investment in the Asia Pacific.
Members like Australia, New Zealand and Japan fought hard to ensure it would not become a myopic trade bloc that discriminated against and sought to divert economic activity away from others. Read more…
Author: Natasha Ardiani, ANU
The manufacturing sector plays a significant role in the global trading system, accounting for more than half of the world’s industrial output in 2010.
Around 30 per cent of this trade relates to the exchange of intermediate inputs and goods for processing. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
In Washington and Beijing last week there were important meetings that are likely to be influential in where the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations on regional trade arrangements lead down the track.
In Washington, the US administration called in ambassadors from the eight negotiating partners to up the ante on an early deal. Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
In President Obama’s landmark speech in Canberra last month, an over-riding theme was that the United States welcomes China’s rise so long as it plays by the global rules.
Yet those rules are dynamic, and there is a need to have China involved in setting them given the scale of China and its importance to the regional and global economy, as well as to global security. Read more…
Author: Joel Rathus, ANU
The global financial crisis forced East Asian nations to get serious about regional architecture.
As global trade entered a precarious decline during the height of the crisis in 2008–09, one of the obvious areas of focus for East Asia was trade regionalism, aimed at making East Asia a more efficient production network and, over time, a final market in its own right. Read more…
Author: Hubert Wu, University of Melbourne
It is wrong to assess the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) against its short-term benefits — these may very well be non-existent. Instead, the deal’s true value hinges upon its chances of a medium-term expansion into Asia.
The TPP is an ambitious regional trade agreement under negotiation between ten economies: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US, Vietnam and as of early November, Japan. The Agreement has concluded its ninth round of negotiations in Lima, Peru, with an unofficial round also occurring recently at the 2011 APEC summit in Hawaii.
Read more…
