Today Trends

Author: Marina Yue Zhang, UTS Clean energy technologies are essential to achieve the decarbonisation targets set in the Paris Agreement . Critical minerals — including lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, copper and rare earth elements — are vital to produce clean energy products like solar panels, wind turbines and power batteries for electric vehicles (EVs). Demand for lithium, a key component in lithium-ion batteries, has soared over the past three years as the clean energy transition accelerates. Though abundant, lithium is unevenly distributed and non-renewable. And until an alternative material for or approach to power batteries becomes available, lithium looks set to be at the centre of geopolitical tensions over the control of critical resources. The top three producing countries process over 80 per cent of the most critical minerals used in lithium batteries. China dominates the processing of almost all minerals, with more than 50 per cent of total market share — except fo...

Author: Purnendra Jain, The University of Adelaide and Daisuke Akimoto, Hosei University In early February 2023, the son of Japan’s former defence minister Nobuo Kishi, Nobuchiyo Kishi announced that he would run for a parliamentary seat. He will inherit the electoral constituency of his father, who announced his retirement from politics only days before. Nobuchiyo is a classic example of the hereditary politics that remain entrenched in Japan’s political system . On 14 February 2023, Mainichi Shimbun reported that Nobuchiyo was forced to take down his family tree from his website homepage because of criticism of its hereditary symbolism. Hereditary politicians, called seshu , are those whose family members serve as politicians, train their inheritors and pass on their political capital accumulated over decades. Coming from a renowned Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) political family in Japan’s rural Yamaguchi prefecture, Nobuchiyo Kishi is almost guaranteed to succeed in the by-...

Author: Charles Dunst, CSIS Three out of four Cambodians have never known life without Hun Sen. The Prime Minister, currently the longest serving one in the world, came into power during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in 1985. Some  75 per cent  of Cambodians were born after that. But Hun Sen is only 70 or 71 years old and appears to be in reasonably good health. There is no reason to think that he will disappear from the scene any time soon. There are, however, some indications  that he is planning to hand control of Cambodia to his eldest son, Hun Manet, the 44 year old general and commander of the Royal Cambodian Army. This handoff could occur sooner than expected — perhaps following the July 2023 elections in which Hun Sen will almost surely further cement his and the Cambodian People’s Party’s (CPP) grip on power. Any handoff to Hun Manet will be carefully managed, with Hun Sen likely to remain CPP President. Either way, US and allied officials wo...

Author: Yasuo Takao, Curtin University Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida used a policy speech at the opening of the 2023 session of Japan’s parliament, the National Diet, to declare that Japan was ‘on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions’ due to the country’s population crisis. The country’s median age is 49 — the second highest in the world. In the 2021 House of Representatives election, the median age of those who cast a vote was 59. The centre of gravity of Japanese electoral politics has shifted from taxpayers to pensioners, with the potential of the elderly exerting more political pressure over policymakers as the population ages. The majoritarian decision-making model suggests that self-interested aging voters are likely to support increasingly generous social benefits for themselves, even at the expense of other generations. In Japan, voter turnout has consistently been higher and is steadily increasing among older people. The age gap in Japan’s ...

Author: Editorial Board, ANU It’s now been a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. In response to an unprovoked act of aggression, Western countries imposed a sweeping set of sanctions designed to force the Russian army back behind its own borders. These included disconnecting Russian banks from the SWIFT interbank communication system, export controls on technologically advanced goods and the freezing of Russian reserves held in overseas central banks. The sanctions provoked a massive devaluation of the ruble, requiring drastic action from Russian monetary authorities that inflicted deep economic pain on the country. Hopes were high in the West that the pain would deepen over time, eventually making the invasion politically and economically unsustainable for Moscow. This proved an overly ambitious goal. Some sanctions, particularly those targeting Russian military procurement, probably did give the Ukrainian army the breathing space it needed to mount its effective counter-offensives...

Author: Ken Heydon, LSE There is a paradox with economic sanctions. They tend to command widespread support within the sanctioning country yet frequently fail to change the behaviour of the targeted country. Despite twenty years of sanctions, North Korea can now make a nuclear strike anywhere within the United States. It also supplied infantry rockets and missiles to the Russian private military group Wagner in November 2022. The unprecedented campaign of sanctions aimed at crippling Russia — the world’s eleventh biggest economy — may have helped deny Russian President Vladimir Putin the early victory he expected in Ukraine but has failed to change his behaviour. Sanctions are likely to fail when a combination of conditions appear. The effectiveness of sanctions can be undermined by the targeted country’s ability, through market power, to bypass sanctions while imposing considerable economic pain on the sender . Unilateral sanctions are much harder to implement. The likelihood...

Author: Soumya Bhowmick, Observer Research Foundation Bangladesh’s economy has grown at impressive rates in the last decade. Even as one of the few countries to maintain a high growth rate during the COVID-19 pandemic — recording 6.94 per cent growth in 2021 — Bangladesh has started to show signs of stalling. Recent mass protests against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government are a direct consequence of fears about a collapsing economy. Global macroeconomic shocks since 2020 have been brutal — pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions, extreme climatic events, geopolitical tensions and the Ukraine–Russia war. It has not been easy, especially for countries of the Global South like Bangladesh with fewer financial resources and less economic resilience. Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a  US$4.7 billion loan  sought by Bangladesh’s government as a  ‘stabilisation’  package , unlike the ‘bailout’ packages sought by Sri Lanka...

Author: Hiroki Takeuchi, Southern Methodist University At a press conference on 28 May 2020, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told reporters that China was considering joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Following Li’s comments, Wendy Cutler, former US chief negotiator of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, argued that China’s interest should be taken seriously because the economic reforms that China would be required to undertake as a CPTPP member ‘would be a welcome step for a beleaguered global trading system’. China formally applied to the CPTPP on 16 September 2021. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November 2022, President Xi Jinping advocated for China’s CPTPP candidacy again. But while Xi’s pursuit of CPTPP membership suggests a willingness to reform China’s state-led economic structure, the news that Li — a strong proponent of reformism — will not be reappointed to the Central Committee in 2023 has raised que...

Author: Andrew Blakers, ANU In 2021, Australian company Star Scientific signed an agreement with the Philippine government to develop green hydrogen as a fuel source. This agreement joins a long list of similar agreements around the world. But the number of large-scale hydrogen projects that have progressed from agreements into development is rather short. Vastly more investment is pouring into solar and wind energy than hydrogen. Why is there such a disparity between hydrogen talk and hydrogen action? Fossil fuels cause three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions. Most countries have committed to deep reductions or the elimination of greenhouse emissions by the middle of the 21st century. This necessarily requires the elimination of fossil fuels from the global economy. Solar and wind generators comprise three-quarters of global electricity generation capacity additions — and 99 per cent in Australia. New coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric capacity additions comprise t...

Authors: Bryan Mercurio and Ronald Tundang, CUHK Indonesia has vast potential. Despite numerous setbacks since its independence in 1945 — including the 1997 Asian financial crisis — the country is now the largest Southeast Asian economy and a member of the G20. Traditionally an agrarian economy, Indonesia is transitioning towards more services and manufacturing employment. These efforts have been promoted by strong government intervention . Indonesia actively pursues industrial policies to increase the capacity of its enterprises, which are mainly state owned, in order to compete with foreign firms in the global value chain. To achieve high-income status, Indonesia has to be more competitive, as it only ranked 50th out of 141 countries in 2019. The odds of middle-income countries reaching high-income status are small. Only 16 developing economies leaped to high-income status between 1960 and 2014 and many did so through good fortune or by joining the European Union. Other success...