Today Trends

Author: Editorial Board, ANU Nine months into the Biden presidency, it’s becoming apparent that the US administration doesn’t have a trade policy of its own. Former president Donald Trump’s import tariffs on Chinese goods remain in place, as does his Phase One trade deal with China outside of established global trade rules. The dispute settlement system at the WTO is still unable to enforce its rules due to the United States’ blocking the appointment of Appellate Body judges. Bereft of new ideas, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai recently doubled down on China tariffs and the Phase One trade deal. As Gary Hufbauer writes in our first feature this week : ‘Three-quarters of Tai’s actions are Lighthizer’s policies with softer edges and a smiling face’. The only new policies are the protectionist Buy American measures that limit US government procurement to domestic production. President Biden has taken that principle to heart and bought Trump’s ‘America First’ trade policies. The ...

Author: William Reinsch, CSIS CSIS in Washinton was privileged on 4 October to host US Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai as she explained the Biden administration’s trade policy on China. We learned that Ambassador Tai has lots of tools for dealing with China — none of which she specified — and that how she proceeds will be influenced by how future discussions with her Chinese counterpart, presumably Vice Premier Liu He, proceed. The first of those occurred four days later. Ambassador Tai announced that the tariff exclusion process would resume, which it did via a USTR announcement the next day. As for her speech, judging from the Twitterverse, most listeners were left confused. She seemed to be saying simultaneously that the United States was going to continue to press China on its non-market policies that hurt US companies and workers but that she doesn’t have great hopes for success in persuading the Chinese to change policies. That leads to the obvious question, which ...

Author: Gary Clyde Hufbauer, PIIE President Biden’s trade policy recalls Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot . This is exactly what Biden wants the business community, foreign partners and the Congress to do: wait until two massive domestic ‘infrastructure’ spending bills — the term’s use should be understood loosely — make their way into law. Biden wants no distraction to obstruct the extremely close and highly contested congressional votes on the two bills, which together portend new outlays of at least US$3 trillion over 10 years. The progressive wing of the Democratic party, led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is ready to defeat any presidential pursuit of conventional trade policy, namely lowering barriers to promote two-way trade. According to the far-left, trade liberalisation enriches corporations and impoverishes workers. It delivers no net benefit to Americans. Progressives argue that trade policy should restrict commerce to promote labour rights abroad an...

Author: Christoph Nedopil Wang, Fudan University Greening finance will be front and centre at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change this November in Glasgow. The main program features a finance day on 3 November, putting finance ahead of the other seven themed days. But there is a danger that leaders’ hopes for ‘mobilising finance’ in the fight against climate change are over-simplistic and over-optimistic. Leaders risk overpromising and underdelivering. To improve green finance as a powerful tool for reducing climate emissions and increasing climate change resilience in Asia and beyond , leaders at COP26 must make tough choices. They must decide which commitments they will negotiate within the different workstreams and the leaders’ summit. The risk is that leaders will focus on topics that require lengthy discussions. These discussions may not yield (new) results or may produce underwhelming outcomes, such as global...

Authors: Huynh Tam Sang and Phan Van Tim, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City Taiwan’s success in keeping COVID-19 in check provides it with an opportunity to hasten its outreach to Vietnam, which is still suffering under the pandemic. Taiwan has proven its competency in containing the second outbreak of COVID-19, which was caused by the Delta strain of the virus. Daily cases in Taiwan were quickly brough under control from more than 400 in late May to just seven at the end of September — and even hit zero for the first time in 193 days on 19 October . COVID-19-related restrictions are being relaxed with conditional re-openings . While Taiwan seems to have kept the pandemic under check, Vietnam has been scrambling to contain a severe Delta outbreak since late April . The number of cases in Vietnam surged dramatically from a few thousand in April to over 896,000 cases and 21,800 deaths as of 27 October . At the same time, Taiwan’s first dose vaccination rate has surpass...

Authors: Xunpeng Shi, UTS and Muyi Yang, Ember The world is now battling a major energy crisis. Gas and oil price spikes are raging across Europe and the United States, as are coal and power shortages in China and India. While these crises have a common cause — maintaining reliable energy supply during an energy transition — China’s power crisis , which has resulted in rationing and industrial production cuts affecting two-thirds of the country’s provinces, is the consequence of unique circumstances . China’s crisis reflects the inability of its energy governance regime to deal with the complexity of decarbonisation and energy transition while maintaining sufficient supply and reliability. Despite the progressive demise of the planned economy, formal planning still retains a central place in the governance of China’s energy sector. The Five-Year Plans are important tools for this purpose. The Plans translate long-term strategic decisions into short-term national targets ,...

Authors: Niccolò Manych, MCC, Cecilia Han Springer, Boston University, Michael Jakob and Jan Christoph Steckel, MCC. Coal power generation needs to be phased out quickly to achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement. Cost-competitive renewable energies are already pushing coal out of the market in many countries. Nevertheless, some countries are still constructing new coal-fired power plants. China is an important part of this puzzle. It is not only the largest coal user but has also been a major financier of coal power plants abroad, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This is despite the Paris Agreement stating that finance flows should be ‘consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions’. President Xi Jinping recently pledged that China would stop building coal plants abroad. While this announcement deserves praise, it remains unclear if Xi was referring to finance as well as construction and when this moratorium would be enacted. The withdra...

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW Canberra Japan’s new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was proactive and dynamic in his pursuit of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidency, which was totally out of character with his behaviour throughout his political career. He was reportedly driven by the conviction that ‘ it [was] now or never ’. He is once again going all out for a resounding victory in the lower house general election scheduled for 31 October. It is early days, but Kishida’s actions to date provide clues as to what kind of prime minister he will be if the election delivers him the prime ministership. They suggest that Kishida is unlikely to take on traditional LDP vested interests and will instead be more in the conciliatory mould of former prime minister Hayato Ikeda , to whom he is bound by factional lineage. Kishida’s policy proposals to date suggest that he is flexible to the point of retreating from his initially ambitious objectives. This is most evident with resp...

Author: Juan J Palacios, University of Guadalajara China’s bid for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is a multifaceted move. An overlooked aspect of it is the fact that the CPTPP is the first major free trade agreement established on a trans-Pacific scale and that three of its four members on the eastern side of the Pacific happen to be Latin American countries. China’s application was presented to the CPTPP Commission the same day that the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia announced AUKUS — a security alliance that unabashedly seeks to bring about a new balance of power in the Pacific. This was also the rationale for the design of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement predicated on former US president Barack Obama’s statement that ‘the United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay’. In both cases, the underlying purpose was to counter the strides that China was making to gain milit...

Authors: Yoo-jung Lee, Stanford University, and Yves Tiberghien, UBC South Korea was well prepared and acted rapidly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020. It pioneered new methods of aggressive COVID-19 containment while avoiding a national lockdown, a hard border, or overly disruptive lifestyle measures. As a result, South Korea has suffered just 54 deaths per million as of 23 October  2021. This contrasts with a world average death rate of 628 per million. Paradoxically, South Korean society is coming out of the crisis in 2021 more fragmented and divided. The primary roots of the success of many East Asian countries in mitigating COVID-19 lay in institutional strengths. As early as 22 January 2020, South Korea triggered its centralised emergency response committee. Its first test kits were available on 31 January, and massive mask production was activated in early February. South Korea relied on aggressive quarantine and contact-tracing measures, includin...