Today Trends

Authors: Henrietta McNeill, ANU and Joanne Wallis, University of Adelaide Samoa is facing a political impasse as caretaker Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, leader of the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), faces off against his former deputy Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, now leader of the Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST party). The 9 April 2021 general election resulted in a stalemate after 25 parliamentarians were elected from each party. The one independent member broke the deadlock by aligning with FAST, but a recently introduced gender quota , requiring 10 per cent of parliamentarians to be female, allowed the Samoan Electoral Commission to appoint a woman from the HRPP. This created a further impasse, with HRPP and FAST having 26 seats each. To break the deadlock, the Samoan Head of State Tuimalealiifano Va’aletoa Sualauvi II called for a second general election. The resulting legal challenge saw the Supreme Court declare the use of the gender quota to b...

Author: Roland Rajah, Lowy Institute Indonesia’s new ‘ Omnibus Law on Job Creation ’ was marred by the public controversy that surrounded its passage late last year. The government nonetheless hailed the law as a major regulatory overhaul that would attract foreign investment and create jobs. In reality, it lacks important detail, meaning its success will ultimately depend on the vagaries of implementation . The first batch of implementing regulations released this year however show some promise — introducing important steps to liberalise the labour market while notionally cutting away a plethora of restrictions on inward foreign direct investment (FDI). Notwithstanding important limitations, this represents the first set of serious liberalising reforms to be introduced under President Joko Widodo after almost seven years in power. While sixteen so-called ‘reform packages’ were released during Widodo’s first term, these were not ambitious enough to yield much in accelerating econ...

Author: Editorial Board, ANU Until May last year, health centres in Japan were using fax machines to send handwritten reports of COVID-19 cases to the health ministry. While the reporting moved online soon after, the issue exemplifies Japan’s struggle to move away from requiring signatures or hanko stamps on physical paper for authorisation. Despite its high-tech image, Japan is still very much a paper-based analog society, including in the widespread use of hard cash and a reluctance to adopt digital payment. In the digital age, the degree to which a nation can adopt and employ new digital technologies has become a crucial determinant of its capacity for economic transformation. The ability to innovate through digital technologies reached a new level of urgency with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and will, to a great extent, predict the propensity of an economy to absorb and emerge from the pandemic shock. While most governments aspire to attain digital competitiveness and ...

Author: Richard Katz, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs Different technological regimes give rise to and require different business institutions. When circumstances change, so must the institutions. Otherwise yesterday’s strengths become today’s weaknesses, and economic growth slows. This is unfortunately Japan’s plight, with its analogue era champions failing to adapt to today’s digital world. No longer does Sony churn out one must-have product after another. Japan ranked a dismal 25th in overall digital competitiveness in 2020 according to the IMD World Competitiveness Center. Companies in Japan spend plenty on information and communications technology (ICT), but get less bang for the yen. Japan ranks 56th in ‘business agility’, which measures how well a country uses ICT. Most Japanese companies use ICT primarily to cut costs by automating tasks they are already doing, like inventory control. But what makes ICT revolutionary is that companies can do things that...

Author: Nith Kosal, Future Forum Agriculture remains an important sector in the developing world. In Cambodia, it is one of the top three economic sectors . But for a long time the sector has faced several critical barriers . One such barrier is the gap between farmers and financial support, and the failure of the Agricultural and Rural Development Bank (ARDB) grant-credit program to bridge it. The ARDB is a public bank that aims to contribute to the development of agriculture and the rural economy . But the bank seems to be moving away from this goal. The bank’s subsidies have focussed mainly on rice (76 per cent of total credit in 2019), especially funding for rice storage, drying facilities and collecting purchase paddy from farmers. Yet most of the firms that receive ARDB funding are medium-sized enterprises that are operated by knowledgeable people who are able to independently find funding sources from private banks and who are members of the Cambodia Rice Federation . These...

South Korea’s by-elections on 7 April resulted in a landslide victory for the opposition People Power Party (PPP), including mayors in Seoul and Busan — the country’s two largest cities. The defeat of the ruling Democratic Party (DP) accelerates President Moon Jae-in’s descent into a lame-duck, a moniker that will stick him throughout his final year in office. What stands out from the recent elections is the emerging cleavages between generations and genders. Young South Korean voters in their 20s and 30s, who historically vote left, have turned into swing voters, switching their support from the DP to the PPP. Notably, 72.5 per cent of male voters in their 20s supported the PPP’s candidate for Seoul’s mayoral race . The ruling DP and its supporters are analysing its failure in the recent elections. Conclusions about what went wrong and how to move forward are deeply and acrimoniously divided within and outside of the party. The opposition built an electoral coalition to cons...

Author: Kristoffer Daniel Tan Li, GRIPS The Philippines celebrated its first National Innovation Day on 21 April 2021. By global measures, there is much to be celebrated: the Global Innovation Index (GII) ranked the Philippines as the 50th most innovative economy in 2020 — up from 100th in 2014. Among the world’s lower-middle-income economies, the Philippines ranks 4th behind Vietnam, Ukraine and India, with above average performance in business sophistication, knowledge and technology outputs. But innovation’s promise to deliver superior economic performance and development outcomes remains elusive. The Philippines seems perennially stuck in the middle-income trap, facing some of the worst poverty and inequality in the region. Key innovation-related development measures such as domestic value added (DVA) and total production output in high technology sectors are revealing. The Philippines is the only country among the ASEAN-6 nations (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippin...

Author: Guy Burton, Brussels School of Governance China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi embarked on a six-country tour of the Middle East at the end of March 2021. On the eve of his departure, Wang announced China’s five-point plan for the region, which included mutual respect, equity and justice, non-proliferation, collective security and development cooperation. The principles set out in the five-point plan are uncontentious — and it is also not the first time that China has issued a plan for the Middle East. In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a four-point plan around the Israel–Palestine conflict. Four years later he re-launched it, this time referencing China’s Belt and Road Initiative — with Israel and Palestine as important partners. What makes the recent five-point plan unique is its wider scope to include other conflicts in Syria, Libya and Yemen, as well as the rivalries in the Gulf. In a departure from previous proposals, Wang also set out some concrete suggestio...

Authors: John Walsh, Trung Quang Nguyen and Burkhard Schrage, RMIT Vietnam Corporate governance rules in Vietnam need an upgrade. Vietnam’s ambitious program of developing smart cities and installing climate change-resilient infrastructure requires complex public–private partnerships (PPPs) that challenge the worldview of some policymakers. Vietnam’s corporate governance rules do not meet international standards and are not yet capable of dealing with the next generation of government–business relationships that problems like climate change demand. The doi moi ( renovation ) reforms undertaken in Vietnam since 1986 sought to create a socialist-oriented market economy. This involved the gradual injection of market mechanisms into what was previously a centrally-controlled command economy. Reform entailed a shift from total government ownership to a partially privately-owned economy, starting in 1992 with the demutualisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and their transformatio...

Author: Ka Zeng, University of Arkansas In the past couple of decades multinational corporations have invested heavily in China to cut production costs and capitalise on the rapidly growing domestic market. In the process, they turned the country into the factory of the world and a global supply chain hub. But the ongoing trade war between the United States and China and the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the vulnerability of complex global supply chains to ongoing structural changes in the global economy resulting from rising labour costs, automation, protectionism and geopolitical tensions. These developments have prompted a critical re-evaluation of existing approaches to global sourcing and manufacturing activities to increase supply chain resilience and reduce external risks. The extensive supply chain linkages China has developed with partner countries can be seen in both its backward and forward global value chain (GVC) linkages. Backward linkages are the share of for...

Author: Ayako Hatano, Centre for Human Rights Education and Training ‘ I am glad I could survive until today ’, one plaintiff said on 17 March 2021 when, in a landmark decision, the Sapporo District Court in Japan ruled that failure to recognise same-sex marriages violates Article 14 of the Constitution on the right to equality. The court determined that sexual orientation ‘ cannot be chosen or changed by one’s own will ’. It concluded that it is unreasonably discriminatory that same-sex couples cannot enjoy the legal benefits of marriage afforded to heterosexual couples. This first-ever decision on the constitutionality of marriage equality in Japan was lauded by LGBTQI communities and allies in and out of the country as a significant milestone toward a more inclusive society, giving hope to many same-sex couples and sexual minorities nationwide. The court also acknowledged decades of local activism has contributed to a growing public awareness of the need to eliminate discri...