Authors: Brad Glosserman, CSIS, Peter Walkenhorst and Ting Xu, Bertelsmann Foundation
The most recent sign of the global order’s age and obsolescence was the BRICS summit held in New Delhi on 29 March 2012. Even though the group of countries that make up BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will not reorder global politics, their determination to articulate the grievances of emerging states should not be ignored.
Take, for example, their call for a new development bank to complement the World Bank by placing greater emphasis on the needs and priorities of developing economies as those nations themselves see them. Read more…
Author: R Kohli, ICIER
A combination of structural and cyclical factors has triggered a new wave of portfolio capital flows into emerging market economies.
Incorporating the fresh lessons learnt from the 2008 crisis, the policy toolkit of emerging markets economies has now been expanded to include capital controls. Read more…
Author: Cyn-Young Park, ADB
The global financial crisis has prompted a wide range of policy responses and long-overdue reform initiatives, implemented by an unprecedented degree of intergovernmental policy coordination to build a collective response — not just between large, advanced economies but with strong participation from emerging market economies, too.
The world economy has turned a corner, but the challenges it faces remain daunting. Read more…
Author: Ross H. McLeod, ANU
Indonesia was one of very few countries not to suffer a severe decline in growth as a result of the global financial crisis.
Even at its lowest point in mid-2009, the GDP growth rate remained above 4 per cent per annum, recovering to a surprisingly high 6.9 per cent by the end of 2010 — with growth being driven primarily by investment spending, indicating a high level of business confidence. Read more…
Author: Max Corden, University of Melbourne
People critical of global imbalances often blame the surplus countries and their currency manipulation. This column introduces a Policy Insight that argues that the basic problem has been the inefficiency of the world’s financial sector, which led to unfruitful investment in the US rather than productive investment in emerging economies.
The global imbalances are widely seen as a problem, especially by the US government and US economists. Read more…
Author: Barry Carin, CIGI
The G20 is again in the news following the February 2011 Finance Ministers’ meeting with media coverage dominated by news that leaders agreed on a ‘list of indicators to identify and reduce trade imbalances.’
This development comes under France’s G20 presidency, which inherits an unfinished agenda from past G20 summits. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, ANU
The G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting in Paris over the weekend clinched a deal on the indicators that will be used to evaluate and to tackle the economic imbalances, said to be at the heart of managing recovery from the global crisis.
Importantly, China signed on to the deal, the announcement of which reports that trade balance and investment flows will be monitored ‘taking due consideration of exchange rate, fiscal, monetary and other policies.’ Read more…
Author: David Vines, Oxford University and ANU
After the Great Depression, US policymakers lost their nerve, and embarked upon fiscal consolidation.
They tipped the US, and the world, back into recession in 1937-38. The resulting problem was only resolved by the onset of World War II. Read more…
Author: Andrew Sheng, University of Malaya and Tsinghua University
There are a lot of global architecture, theoretical, and micro-institutional incentives issues that Asia must address in the wake of the GFC.
Conventional wisdom is not helping to solve the dilemma of a global market that is still regulated at national levels. Read more…
Author: Andrew Low, RedBridge Grant Samuel
It has now become conventional wisdom in Australia to observe that the growth of China and, to a lesser extent, other countries in Asia rescued our economy from a likely recession after the global financial crisis. While a sound banking system and proactive fiscal and monetary response were also important, Australia was fortunate to be the most proximate and efficient quarry for commodity-hungry capital investment in the region.
There is, however, a danger that Australia’s good fortune in having good customers and terms of trade might lead it to overlook the other fundamental changes going on in the region. Read more…
Author: Suiwah Leung, ANU
A new generation of leadership is expected to emerge from the 11th national congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party in January 2011. Both the President and the Secretary-General of the Vietnamese Communist Party are expected to be stepping down, and a question mark hovers over the re-appointment of the current Prime Minister, Mr Nguyen Tan Dung.
After leading the country into the WTO, amongst other market-oriented reforms, Mr Dung’s personal standing within the Party has been tarnished in recent months by the near-collapse of the large state-owned shipbuilding conglomerate, Vinashin. Read more…
Author: Thee Kian Wie, LIPI
The Indonesian economy has managed to achieve very solid growth after successfully weathering the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. The economy grew at 4.5 per cent in 2009, is likely to grow at 6.0 per cent in 2010 and is projected to grow at 6.2 per cent in 2011. This kind of performance is making many Indonesians wonder whether Indonesia could soon join the BRIC group of high-performing emerging economies.
The term ‘BRIC’ was coined in 2001, by Dominic Wilson of Goldman Sachs, to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China, which were experiencing rapid economic growth, and were expected to overtake the U.S. by 2018. Read more…
Author: Peter Sheehan, Victoria University
The COP15 meeting at Copenhagen in December 2009 has been a watershed in international climate negotiations, both in terms of outcomes and of our understanding of the problems involved in reaching agreement. Widely regarded as a failure because no universal, binding agreement to reduce emissions was achieved, it did produce two notable outcomes: a shared commitment to hold peak global warming to less than 2⁰C and the provision by many countries, under the framework of the Copenhagen Accord, of new commitments to reduce future emissions. It also sharpened debate about what type of agreement should be aimed for – top down or bottom up, legally binding or not, and so on.
As observed in the East Asia Forum by Dr Stephen Howes, COP15 collapsed under the weight of inflated expectations. Read more…
Authors: Mahendra Siregar and Tuti Irman, Republic of Indonesia
The unprecedented level of policy coordination by G20 countries in response to the global financial and economic crisis in 2008 was instrumental in preventing the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. It is still too early to say that the crisis is over, but at least we can safely say that it could have been much worse if the G20 had not acted swiftly. This success was the most important reason why the Summit of Heads of State or Government in Pittsburgh decided that from then on the G20 would be the premier forum for international economic cooperation—an historic decision from the perspective of global governance as well as the role of Asia in the global economy.
Does the G20 offer a new approach to global governance? Read more…
Author: Takatoshi Ito, Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo
The G20 includes more Asian countries than any other global grouping, and it is expected to be a good forum for Asian countries to press their agenda.
The G20 Summit was created out of the chaos of the global financial crisis. After Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, global financial markets went into a tailspin. Securities markets were frozen as buyers disappeared. Read more…
