Country And Regional Studies
Can LNG continue to fuel Papua New Guinea's economic growth?
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…
Does it matter if Australia is no longer among the top 20 largest economies?
A recent report by PwC, The World in 2050, suggests that Australia could slip from 19th largest economy in the world in 2014 to 28th in 2050.
The report comes from the UK and…
How Greece and Europe can both win
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…
How much is too much? The debt mystery
The 2008 financial crisis left no doubt that ill-considered debt can cause major damage not just to an individual country, but to the global economy.
You might think that by now,…
China's investment rebalance
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…
Is China slowing down? Not much
The Wall Street Journal:
China's economic growth slowed to 7.4% in 2014, downshifting to a level not seen in a quarter century and firmly marking the end of a high-growth heyday…
Indonesia leads on petrol subsidies, but will others follow?
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…
Is China fragile?
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a parable for unanticipated risk: the possibility of 'unknown unknown' events that no-one sees coming.
In a new essay, The Calm…
Why Larry Summers might be wrong about China's growth
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…
Indonesia's economy at a crossroads
With the passing of the presidential baton from Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to Joko Widodo just a month away, Indonesia is at a political crossroad, with the first clear break from…