Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Rod Broadhurst, ANU
Across the Asian region, crime follows opportunity and is fostered by globalisation, economic growth, conflict and social change.
Weak and erratic governance also multiplies the risk of transnational crime by offering potential safe havens for criminals. Read more…
Author: Stephen Costello, Washington
Reading statements from the US and ROK administrations and the international press regarding recent North Korean declarations against South Korea, it seems that there has been a broad failure to realise that the North is terribly and predictably offended by the rhetoric from the South Korean president and much of the South Korean media.
When Pyongyang says that certain statements from President Lee Myung-bak and the conservative press are injurious and seek to humiliate and degrade North Korea, it means Read more…
Author: Veronica L. Taylor, ANU
No one now seriously doubts Australia’s interdependency with its Asian neighbours.
Our borders are porous, we are exposed to one another’s risk, and our trade, investment, economic and social development, political stability and regional security depend on mutual cooperation. Read more…
Author: S. Mahmud Ali, LSE
International security literature has developed a new sub-genre focusing on the upcoming ‘Asian Century’.
Explanations of precisely what this term might mean still vary widely, but the changing power relations between the US and its presumed peer rival, China, lie at the core of the discussion. Read more…
Author: Virginia Hooker, ANU
The Issues Paper that kick-started debate about Australia in the Asian Century is a provocative document.
It recognises the urgency of implementing national policies that will enable Australia to interact positively with Asia. Yet it fails to address two interlinked characteristics of Australian society: the ongoing anxiety about racial and religious difference and unease about socio-economic change. Read more…
Authors: Mahendra Siregar and David Nellor, Republic of Indonesia
While Asia’s emerging economies account for less than 30 per cent of global GDP, they contributed close to 60 per cent of global growth in 2011 and are expected to do the same in 2012.
The simple response here would be to assume that Asia is on the right track and that it simply needs to do ‘more of the same’. Read more…
Author: Andrew Sheng, Fung Global Institute
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard was first attributed as likening his country to America’s deputy sheriff in Asia back in 1999.
This observation may have been true during the Cold War — when Australia was the Anglo-Saxon outpost near the Bamboo curtain — but with Australia’s trade and investment with Asia now outweighing that with America and Europe, the geopolitical landscape has changed profoundly. Read more…
Author: Barry Eichengreen, UC Berkeley
Everyone by now has grown accustomed to, if not physically weary of, articles extolling China’s economic dynamism and rehearsing America’s decline.
While the US is only starting to recover from its most serious recession in nearly 80 years, China glided through the global financial crisis largely unscathed. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
Building a stable international order in Asia and the Pacific, in which a major international conflict remains unthinkable, requires a number of elements.
Understandably much of the focus on thinking about avoiding the unthinkable, to date, has been on the how to manage the rise of China’s power and its impact on America. Read more…
Author: Yoshihide Soeya, Keio University
Many thought after the end of the Cold War that the time of traditional balance-of-power games was over.
Japan, too, attempted to re-establish its international presence by responding to the new trend of multilateral cooperation, and sought to help build a new international order in Asia and the world. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
The 21st-century Asian order has entered a long interregnum between the hub-and-spokes security bilateralism of the US-engineered San Francisco system and the re-emergence of East Asia’s pre-modern international system.
To harmonise the interests of individual states with the requirements of the system at large in the decades ahead, the foremost challenge in the Asian Century will be to nudge the region’s geo-politics toward cooperation — perhaps even a loose concert of powers — as opposed to competition, conflict and division.
Author: Christopher Findlay, University of Adelaide
Australia will face numerous challenges in the ‘Asian Century’, including issues surrounding foreign direct investment (FDI).
More specifically, it is important to reform Australia’s own FDI policy and the policies of its neighbours — as well as one other old-fashioned international policy regime still guiding FDI today.
Author: Jiemian Yang, SIIS
The Asian Century, or Pacific Century, has become a catchphrase that places great emphasis on economic dynamism and political power shifts.
But the cultural and intellectual aspects of the Asian Century have somewhat been neglected. Read more…
Author: He Fan, CASS
A newly released report by the World Bank and the Development Research Center (DRC), a prominent think tank in China, warned that by 2025 China’s economic growth rate would decline to an annual average of 5 per cent — a sharp fall from the 10 per cent average of the last 30 years.
In a widely cited article published in 2011, Liu Shijin, the DRC’s deputy director, also predicted that the average growth rate would fall to 6.7 per cent for the period of China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020).
Author: Peter McDonald, ANU
The world’s population grew by two per cent per annum in the late 1960s, and if this rate had been maintained, it would have exceeded 18 billion in 2050.
Today, the United Nations Population Division projects a population of around nine billion by that time. Read more…