Country And Regional Studies

Growth is certainly slower and its structure is changing, but is the outlook for China's economy quite as awful as global share markets seem to think? Now the world's biggest economy (using the IMF's purchasing power parity measure), China matters vastly more for world markets than it did a

Over the last few weeks, global financial markets have once again demonstrated their predilection for over-reacting to ephemeral news. For their part, the media are always happy to pad out the 24-hour news cycle with a breaking crisis. If it's transient, so much the better: you can report a fresh

Arianto Patunru and Sjamsu Rahardja's recent insightful Lowy Institute Analysis, Trade Protectionism in Indonesia: Bad Times and Bad Policy, invokes 'Sadli's Law', named for early New Order technocrat Mohammad Sadli. Perhaps Indonesianists' most well-loved aphorism, it holds that 'bad times may

Ken Ward is to be congratulated for a straight forward and sober analysis of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In his own matter of fact style, Ken takes us through a complex relationship and provides unique understanding and insight. His core point is that the Australia-Indonesia

Just about everyone agrees that the Greek problem has been kicked down the road again, and probably not even very far.  The fantasy nature of the 'agreekment' is clear. Let's put to one side, for instance, a structural reform program which demands that Sunday be mandated as a work-day. This might

In a week in which international news focused on the Greek debt crisis and the possibility of a Grexit, scant attention has been paid to the arrival from Turkey of thousands of smuggled Syrian, Afghan and other migrants by boat to several Greek Islands. Yet the two are connected, and both are likely

There has been little news of the much criticised proposed dam at Don Sahong in the far south of Laos since the beginning of the year, when the Mekong River Commission (MRC) arranged for a series of public meetings to be held in member countries to discuss the dam. From the start, these meetings

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century put inequality centre-stage in the economic debate. But the topic has been around for a long while. Brookings has recently republished Arthur Okun's 40 year-old Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-off, The launch was an opportunity to bring

Infrastructure is now a standard item on the G20 agenda. Serious infrastructure shortages are ubiquitous. With global economic growth slow, ample construction capacity and interest rates at historic lows, there seems to be an opportunity to address the infrastructure gap. But many governments see

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is nothing short of a 'fate changer', said Pakistani Federal Minister Ahsan Iqbal, the man behind the historic project. The excitement appears to be mutual, as China has shown equal enthusiasm for the project throughout a two-day visit by Chinese President

There has been much fretting about China's growth over the past five years. One special focus for hand-wringing has been the Chinese financial system and its non-banking component – the shadow banking system – in particular. Financial growth in China has certainly been rapid since 2007, a

Should Australia join the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)? As often happens in international affairs, the answer is not found in the technical pros and cons of the proposal, but in the politics. America seems to have strongly encouraged its close Asian friends (Japan

This week the IMF Executive Board will consider a proposal to provide Ukraine with a US$17.5 billion Extended Fund Facility. The IMF Managing Director explains that this program 'can succeed'. But it has to be said that the chances are low, given current geopolitical circumstances and Kiev's recent

Chunyun, the annual spring festival holiday in China, is often described as the world's largest human migration. Over one billion trips are made in a 10-day period. The family reunion over the lunar new year is the local equivalent of Christmas and Thanksgiving combined, and for the many families

2015 has been heralded as the year when Papua New Guinea (PNG) will enjoy the highest GDP growth rate in the world, on the back of its first full year of liquefied natural gas production. Confidence in the anticipated revenue from the ExxonMobil-led project has encouraged the O'Neill Government

The press is making much of the academic qualifications of Greece's new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. His specialisation is economic game theory, which in this case might be described as 'the art of bargaining'. Good bargaining skills are, indeed, important. But there are also some basic

I am embarrassed to say that I made a mistake in the analysis below (I should have realised the results were too clear to be true!). In fact, the relative price of investment goods follows the pattern in the graph below. This mistake was discovered by Guonan Ma and staff at the RBA, who tried to

The fall in the world oil price has created the opportunity to eliminate petroleum subsidies in a number of Southeast Asian countries. These subsidies have been the long-standing bane of economic reformers everywhere, but until now reducing them involved the deeply unpopular task of raising petrol

Forecasts of China's growth always attract interest, even when they are a year old. Larry Summers and Lant Prichett are getting another good run with the paper they published last year (see my earlier post), which analyses emerging-economy growth in general, but of China and India in particular

Justin Yifu Lin insists China can grow at 7-8% for another 20 years. A contrarian with a remarkable personal background, the former World Bank chief economist's views influence his country's top leaders and their sense of destiny. What he says matters. How, and how fast, China grows will be highly

The Financial Times ran a front page piece last Monday claiming that China has ordered a ban on state-owned companies using Western management consulting companies. It is alleged by senior Chinese sources that 'foreigners use their consulting companies to find out everything they want about our