Today Trends

Author: Thong Anh Tran (ANU) The Mekong River is the lifeblood of countries in the Mekong region, but the past few years have seen water flows recurringly decline and processes of saltwater intrusion accelerating in the Vietnamese Mekong delta. These transboundary hydrological challenges have detrimental effects on millions of people living in the delta, whose livelihoods depend on the Mekong. Climate change has played a role through the effects of reduced rainfall, rising temperatures, and extreme weather events. But many scholars argue that these transformations cannot solely be attributed to climate change — and that an important part of the explanation lies in the operation of large-scale hydropower dams in the upper stretches of the river. With a controlling role in the delta, some argue that China holds back a significant amount of water for the sake of its own development, with knock-on implications and costs for downstream users. The Mekong Agreement of 1995 provides ...

Authors: Timothy S Rich, Ian Milden and Madelynn Einhorn, Western Kentucky University Many presidential systems, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe, have runoff elections if the first-place candidate fails to win an outright majority. These countries, like South Korea, are typically third-wave democracies where voting results often are splintered by third party candidates. Given that former president Park Geun-hye’s victory in 2012 is the only South Korean presidential election since democratisation to produce a majority winner, would the public support electoral reform? In the recent 2022 election , neither of the top two candidates — the Democratic Party’s Lee Jae-myung and People Power Party’s Yoon Suk-yeol — garnered majority support in most pre-election surveys. Both polled below 40 per cent support in the lead up to the ‘unlikeable election ’ where corruption allegations and negative campaigning turned off many voters . In mid-February, People’s Party candidate...

Author: Kuniaki Nemoto, Musashi University It has become a post-election tradition in Japan for groups of civil activists to sue election commissions across the country due to the disparity in voting power between rural and urban districts. Six High Courts have ruled that the 2021 election for the lower house was conducted in a ‘state of unconstitutionality’ — that is, they found the current level of disparity unconstitutional. But these rulings refrained from nullifying the results as holding another election would incur massive costs and harm democratic legitimacy. Activists, lawyers, parties and politicians are now waiting for a final decision to be made by the Supreme Court. Malapportionment has several political consequences. It goes against the constitutional principle of equality and no discrimination. In the 2021 election, the least populated district (Tottori 1st district) had 231,313 voters, compared to 482,445 voters in the most populated one (Tokyo 13th district). Th...

Author: Martin Weiser, Seoul South Korea’s presidential election on 9 March 2022 was decided by the closest margin in the country’s history. Just a quarter of a million people — or 0.73 per cent of all voters — decided the election by casting their votes for the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol. The centre-left candidate Lee Jae-myung came in second with 47.4 per cent of the vote, while third place went to progressive candidate Sim Sang-jung with 2.4 per cent. With such a small margin, potentially dozens of reasons can be found to explain why Lee’s Democratic Party was not able to win. Lee could have better targeted certain groups like young male voters that mostly voted for Yoon, drawn older female voters away from the anti-feminist conservative candidate, or dispelled fears of additional taxation from home owners. He could have tried harder to capture voters in traditionally conservative strongholds in the south-east and mobilised even more supporters in his party’s s...

Author: Akash Sahu, Manohar Parrikar-Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses India and Japan seem to be checking all the right boxes to develop a deeper partnership. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited India on 19 March 2022 and met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 14th India–Japan Annual Summit in New Delhi. While the two leaders discussed a wide range of issues at the event, economic cooperation was central. Kishida announced that Japan will invest 5 trillion yen (US$42 billion) in India over the next five years to finance public and private projects of ‘mutual interest’. The leaders also welcomed the signing of the exchange of notes on 300 billion yen (US$2.5 billion) in loans to India. Japan’s Expanded Partnership for Quality Infrastructure (EPQI), which was announced in 2015, aims to deliver high-quality infrastructure in developing countries. India has been the largest recipient of Japanese official development assistance (ODA) since 2005. This fundi...

Author: Simon Tay, Singapore Institute of International Affairs Anyone seeking to manage China’s regional economic integration must proceed with caution, but not without hope. Influencing Asia’s largest economy and political player is not going to be easy, especially given the growth and nature of China–US tensions. Past thinking assumed Asian economic integration could be neatly ordered, as described by the metaphor of ‘flying geese’, with Japan leading newly industrialised economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and then others. But the Asian Financial Crisis shifted new waves of foreign direct investment into China, and some countries in Asia lost a generational opportunity to join global value chains. Present shifts in the global economy and supply chains are much more turbulent. A second caution is how much influence anyone can have on China. Investors, like the newly industrialised countries on China’s periphery, might once have held some influence, but th...

Author: I Gede Wahyu Wicaksana, Universitas Airlangga The crisis in Ukraine should prompt Indonesia to reconsider the direction and strategy of its foreign policy. The war is not directly expanding to Indonesia’s immediate geopolitical environment, but it is impacting its strategic situation. China and the United States’ interest and influence in the Russia–Ukraine conflict are also shaping the future of the Indo-Pacific order. Indonesia’s current foreign policy reflects old Cold War views and objectives, especially that Indonesia should be neutral in ideological bloc contestation because taking sides could jeopardise its sovereignty. But the current great power competition in Asia is not powered by ideology, but by geopolitical and geoeconomic interests. This means it is unlikely that a middle power like Indonesia can effectively pursue outdated non-bloc pragmatism amid the evolving regional security architecture. The Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo government must see nonalignment as a means...

Author: Han Phoumin, ERIA Even before the Russia–Ukraine war, the COVID-19 pandemic had brought the world economy into recession. Global oil demand also declined by about 8 million barrels per day in 2020 and 2021. OPEC+ agreed to cut output by 10 million barrels per day from May 2020 to April 2022. This led oil prices to rise to around US$75 per barrel in July 2021, which prompted OPEC+ to raise output again at the end of 2021. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the fear of rising oil prices has escalated globally. Russia accounts for 10 per cent of global oil supplies. Western-led sanctions removed this supply from the market, putting pressure on the oil supply-demand balance. The price of crude oil soared from US$95.42 per barrel to US$127.98 on 8 March before dropping back down to US$95.64 on March 16 and jumping back to US$111.70 on 14 April. The oil price is likely to remain elevated over US$100 per barrel throughout 2022. As a result, the gas price — which is ...

Authors: Danny Quah and Vinod Thomas, NUS Resilience to shocks is no longer just about bouncing back — it’s also about building preparedness for even bigger disruptions. The climate crisis, COVID-19, and geopolitical conflicts epitomise the biggest risks of our time and illustrate how mainstream economic analysis has undervalued long-term prevention. But the escalating dangers call for a higher priority to be given to preparedness as part of resilience building. In the 1981 film Quest for Fire , a prehistoric tribe in Palaeolithic Europe finds that its most precious possession, a fire, got put out. This presented an existential crisis because, while the tribe knew how to use fire, it did not know how to make it. It is vital to be aware of tipping points and irreversible losses because if the flame gets extinguished, there’s no coming back. Whether it is a conflict with a country or with nature, sustainability calls for managing conflicts for the common good. Greater resilience ...

Author: Jayant Menon, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute To understand the interrelationship between ASEAN and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), it is useful to separate the newer, less developed members — Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV) — from the older, more developed ones — Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand (ASEAN 6). RCEP has a diverse agenda and the opportunities and challenges differ across the two groups. If there is an old and new ASEAN, then RCEP too covers old (tariff-related) and new (non-tariff-related) issues. The old issues encompass trade in goods, rules of origin (RoO), customs procedures and trade remedies. New issues are about WTO+ or WTO-x and include trade in services, e-commerce, intellectual property rights and competition. Although it is still a challenge, ASEAN 6 are better placed to pursue the new issues in RCEP. CLMV are further behind and still struggle with the old issues. Analysis of the impacts...

Author: Rahul Nath Choudhury, ICWA In 2022, India has renewed its interest in free trade agreements (FTAs) with several economies, including the United Kingdom and Australia. India and Australia had already signed an interim FTA last week and expected to enter into a full FTA by end of this year. India’s approach to resuming negotiations has a sense of urgency and a few rounds of discussion have already taken place. The United Kingdom has traditionally been a large trading partner for India while Australia is emerging as a promising destination. This is a dramatic shift from India’s earlier approach to FTAs. After assuming power in 2014, the Modi government started reviewing India’s existing trade pacts. There was a widespread belief in the government that FTAs created significant economic losses by allowing subsidised foreign products and other unfair production advantages for foreign firms. Australian trade matters to India because of its growing energy demands. India aspires to...