Today Trends

Author: Raghuram Rajan, University of Chicago War is horrific, no matter how it is waged. Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, with its scenes of Ukrainian civilians being murdered or driven from their homes as refugees, undoubtedly had to be opposed. In addition to supplying Ukraine with military weapons, governments around the world also have deployed economic weapons against Russia — a dangerous nuclear power. Russia, an economic midget relative to its military power, may still lash out by expanding the range of military weapons it uses and the territories it targets. It is a risk the world had to take. Compared to Russia’s indiscriminate bombing, economic weapons will not kill people as quickly, create as much visible destruction or inspire as much fear. But the unprecedented economic weapons that have been deployed against Russia will be unquestionably painful. The strictures on Russia’s central bank have already contributed to the Russian rouble’s collapse and new limitati...

Author: S Nanthini, NTU The recently published Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has highlighted significant increases in extreme weather events, which are likely to lead to food insecurity and increased migration flows. The increasing visibility of climate change is only matched by growing awareness of the threat it poses, with militaries likely to face more pressure to develop their humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) capabilities while also maintaining traditional defence capabilities. Defence diplomacy, broadly understood as military-to-military interactions, activities and policies to build and maintain national security, would be a useful tool for states to advance their foreign policy goals in the ongoing climate crisis. One useful aspect of defence diplomacy is that it need not only be between countries with close relationships. As it can build confidence between states, it can also involve cooperation, or at least the ...

Author: Sajjad Ashraf, Singapore After months of intense politicking, Pakistan’s opposition parties — Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, Pakistan Peoples Party and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam — lodged a motion of ‘no confidence’ in the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan on 8 March 2022. The speaker is obliged to call the National Assembly session no more than 14 days after the requisition. According to the rules of procedure , voting on the motion must take place between 26–30 March 2022. The opposition needs the support of 172 members of the house for the motion to succeed. This time, the bruised opposition leadership has come back with a vengeance. They have faced a verbal onslaught that labelled them ‘thieves, thugs and looters’ since Khan entered the political sphere in 2011. Over the last few months, the opposition has become confident that it has mustered enough votes to topple the government. The limited impact of Khan’s anti-corruption rhetoric and his inept handling of the eco...

Authors: Alan Chong and Tamara Nair, NTU The war in Ukraine has drawn attention to humanitarianism through a do-it-yourself modus operandi . A resident of a previously staunch anti-immigrant Hungarian border town said : ‘I do think we should help everyone, but I guess you don’t realise how important that is until it arrives on your own front door’. Stories of people in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary helping Ukrainians have proliferated. Margo Baldauf  told a BBC reporter  that she recalled the travails of her 97-year-old mother fleeing Hitler’s Nazis: ‘I am more or less a child of a refugee. So I feel obliged to do something for refugees. It’s not Hitler this time, but for me it somehow feels like what Putin does is what Hitler did before’. Additionally, there was the faith based dimension propelling humanitarian relief. Maria Blahoslovennio and Maria Vseblaha,  two nuns from the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk, to...

Author: Kristin Vekasi, University of Maine The world needs more readily available rare earth metals. These metals are used in energy transition technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines, in most contemporary electronic gadgets, and in some defence applications. Over the coming decades, demand for rare earths is forecasted to increase by two to eight times over current supply. Rare earths are part of a complex global value chain . Considerable expertise is needed to turn mined concentrates into refined, separated and industrially useful oxides. Through effective long-term investment across the rare earth supply chain, China has earned some 50–60 per cent of the mining market share and around 90 per cent in the intermediate processing stage. In recent years, Chinese internal demand has started to outstrip supply due to the expanding electronic vehicle and renewable energy markets. China has even started to import crucial heavy rare earths from Myanmar, a supply so...

Author: David Lubin, Citigroup In sanctioning the Russian central bank, the United States and its allies have delivered a very substantial financial shock to Moscow. The power of the shock derives not so much from the sanctioning of a central bank — which is not new in itself, since the United States has previously sanctioned the central banks of Iran and Venezuela — but rather because of the number of participating countries. China will be watching closely. No one knows exactly how much of Russia’s US$640 billion of foreign exchange and gold reserves are now inaccessible, but the country has effectively lost access to hundreds of billions of dollars. The central bank surely must have thought it was protecting itself by de-dollarising its reserves after 2014, investing more in euros, gold and renminbi. But since all transactions with the Russian central bank have been sanctioned, Russia will find it difficult, if not impossible, to use even its US$130 billion worth of gold reserve...

Author: Vikas Kumar, Azim Premji University Achieving gender equity is a major development challenge facing countries such as India. The sex ratio — the ratio of the number of females per thousand males — is a key measure of the scale of the challenge. In the late twentieth century, there was a precipitous decline in the child sex ratio in India — from 962 in 1981 to 918 in 2011. During this period, the overall sex ratio fluctuated between 927 and 943. The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) suggests that India’s overall sex ratio increased from 991 in 2015–16 (NFHS-4) to 1020 in 2019–21 (NFHS-5). The ratio was 1000 in 2005–06 (NFHS-3). The change in sex ratio between 2005–2006 and 2019–2021 is not large and the NFHS has always reported a higher ratio than the Census of India. But the latest NFHS data received media attention because for the ‘ first time on record ’ a major survey may have suggested that there are more women than men in India. Prime Minister Narendra M...

Author: Haihong Gao, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences China is one of the first countries to develop a central bank digital currency. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) first proposed the idea of a digital renminbi in 2014. Since then, significant progress has been made on the concept and the development of the digital renminbi has attracted global attention. One issue that is frequently discussed is whether the digital renminbi will serve as a new channel for the internationalisation of the renminbi. Some believe that the digital renminbi is the best way to challenge the hegemony of the US dollar because it is built on greenfield payment rails with new technology and standards. The development of the digital renminbi could also leverage China’s increasing financial influence to replace the dollar with Chinese technology. Concerns over the digital renminbi challenging the hegemonic position of the dollar are overblown. The digital currency is mainly designed for domestic retail tr...

Author: Editorial Board, ANU Economic cooperation in East Asia has progressed steadily in its own distinct and particular way. Unlike Europe with its customs union and supranational authority in Brussels and North America with its treaty-led integration, ASEAN and the economic powerhouses of China, Japan, and South Korea to its north have pursued non-binding regional cooperation turning the region into a global manufacturing hub. The steady success that has come from taking time to forge consensus and helping the laggards along stands in marked contrast to the retreat to protectionism in the United States and the fracture of the European Union with Brexit. ASEAN has managed to bring its free trade partners together into an East Asia-wide economic agreement. The conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in November 2019 at a time of global turbulence was a huge achievement of strategic significance in pushing back against the threats to the multilateral sy...

Authors: Mari Pangestu and Lili Yan Ing, World Bank and ERIA There are two major platforms for international cooperation that can spur economic recovery in the developing world. One is the G20, which represents two-thirds of the global population, 90 per cent of the world’s GDP and 80 per cent of trade. The other is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which took effect in January 2022. The partnership’s 15 members represent about one-third of the world’s population, GDP, trade and investment. Both have the capacity to address four big trends — global value chains, digitalisation, climate change and pushback against globalisation and protectionism — which have been reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic and to which countries must adapt. The Russia–Ukraine conflict will further disrupt global supply chains and raise protectionism. Trade continues to be an engine of growth and is playing a key role in the recovery spurred by global value chains. In January 2022, the ...

Authors: Meghna Srivastava and Yves Tiberghien, UBC Recent relations between China and India have been divided by both security tensions and opposite alliances. But on 25 March, the China–India relationship seems to have taken a major step forward with the unexpected visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to India. At the recent COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, China and India cooperated on the critical issues of coal reduction and climate justice. On the current Ukraine crisis, China and India both abstained at the UN Security Council and at the UN General Assembly due to their separate and longstanding relationships with Russia — a formal partnership in the case of China and military dependence and China-focused concern in the case of India. Two sets of parallel national narratives — one divergent, one convergent — explain this cognitive dissonance. The most salient feature of China–India relations emphasised in mainstream media is their history of post-colonial ter...