Today Trends

Author: June Park, Schmidt Futures Export controls on semiconductor technology have been expanded after the conclusion of US bilateral negotiations with Japan and the Netherlands in March 2023. This is only the beginning as the United States is set to further tighten export controls, as recommended in the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s final report . The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued new regulations on 7 October 2022, which were expected to bring about protests from semiconductor equipment makers and foundries. While Washington insists that the measures are designed to protect US intellectual property and defend national security, they reflect the heavy competition in the global semiconductor equipment business. According to 2019 figures, the United States had a 17 per cent share of overall semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports, trailing behind Japan (28 per cent) and closely followed by the Netherlands (17...

Authors: Tom Le, Hanah Park and Hina Tanabe, Pomona College On 6 March 2023, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol announced a plan to resolve the forced labourers dispute with Japan, a significant obstacle to bilateral relations. In the plan, South Korean companies that benefited from the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of South Korea will contribute to a fund to compensate victims of forced labour during the Second World War. Although the government of Japan and Japanese companies are not required to contribute to the fund, the Yoon government expects that positive steps from Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government will follow. The 1965 treaty, the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement and the many economic and security agreements signed over the past 58 years demonstrate that the governments regularly ‘move past’ history to meet state-centric objectives. But the benefits of the 2023 force labourer agreement will be fleeting if it replicates the fat...

Author: Giridharan Ramasubramanian, ANU During the February 2023 Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Senior Officials’ Meeting, delegates held discussions on this year’s theme of Creating a Sustainable Future for All , including building resilience and strengthening environmental sustainability. To ensure that APEC plays a significant role in transitioning the region to a sustainable economy, US host officials should build upon APEC’s past achievements and leverage its dynamic organisational structure to realise their priorities. APEC has a strong track record in facilitating efforts at the intersection of trade and sustainability. In 2009, APEC leaders first supported discussions on fossil fuel subsidy reform. Its energy working group developed a voluntary reporting mechanism framework before crafting peer review methodology guidelines. These provided scalable lessons to shape similar efforts within the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international institutions. ...

4Author: Editorial Board, ANU ‘The dollar is our currency, but your problem’. That was how former US Treasury Secretary John Connally described the US dollar back in 1971. That’s never been truer than it is today. The dollar is Russia’s problem because of US financial sanctions. The dollar is China’s problem because, no matter what their chances are in a fighting war, they have no chance in any financial war. The dollar is a problem for developing countries because a strengthening greenback chokes off their access to international capital and, with dynamic international capital flows, the US Federal Reserve’s dominance of global monetary policy complicates their fiscal and financial policy management. The dollar is clearly Brazil’s problem too, given the President’s recent calls to cut the dollar out of international trade invoicing. The dollar isn’t winning any popularity contests at the moment. And the more headaches the US dollar causes, the more countries will struggle to see...

Author: Andrew Sheng, George Town Institute of Open and Advanced Studies, Wawasan Open University Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s recent call for the revival of an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) ‘to reduce reliance on the dollar or the International Monetary Fund’ (IMF), raises the question of whether an AMF was necessary in the first place. Japan proposed the idea of an AMF shortly after the outbreak of the Asian Financial Crisis in July 1997.  Although it was supported by ASEAN countries, the idea was rejected at the Hong Kong IMF and World Bank meetings in September that year by Europe and the United States. The technical objections were on the grounds of duplication or dilution of the IMF’s central role and the creation of moral hazard, as financing credit excesses would encourage more debt excesses. But the real reason was geopolitical. As long as the IMF and World Bank majority shareholders — the United States and Europe — were not involved in the AMF, and China re...

Author: Robert Basedow, London School of Economics Multilateralism is now in crisis. The crisis manifests itself most forcefully in the WTO. The WTO, which counts 164 states as members, has three core functions in global economic governance. It promotes multilateral negotiations on market access and trade rules, resolves trade disputes among its members and monitors and advises on the implementation of members’ commitments. The WTO struggles to fulfil two of these three core functions. The WTO’s Doha Round of negotiations broke down without yielding a comprehensive package on market access or updates to WTO trade rules in view of new economic and trade realities such as e-commerce and data flows. The Dispute Settlement Body — the WTO’s court — has lost its quorum to adjudicate trade disputes due to a long-standing US veto against the appointment of new judges. In response to the crisis engulfing the WTO , policymakers around the world have turned to bilateralism and regionalism ...

Author: Ved Shinde, Asia Society Policy Institute New Delhi’s strategic partnership with Tokyo has shown promise over the last two decades. The recent India–Japan Summit further strengthened ties between the two countries in areas such as security, defence and economic cooperation. Central to this partnership is the creation of a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’, which implicitly seeks to balance China’s rise. A similar strategy should be applied in continental Asia to provide alternatives to Chinese initiatives. Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s initial vision for the Free and Open Indo-Pacific encompassed the incorporation of Central Asia but this component has not gained much traction. In 2015, Abe visited all five Central Asian republics in a single trip, underlining his commitment to the continental aspect of Japan’s Asia strategy. Through his visit, Abe renewed former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto’s ‘Eurasian diplomacy’ policy of the 1990s, which aimed for Japan ...

Author: Sanval Nasim, Colby College South Asia is facing an air pollution calamity. 37 of the 40 most polluted cities in the world are in South Asia, with major metropolises such as Delhi, Lahore, Dhaka and Kathmandu dominating the top ten. Over 60 per cent of South Asia’s population inhabits heavily polluted areas, where air quality levels perennially exceed the World Health Organization’s recommended standards by significant margins. Air pollution is the second highest risk factor for non-communicable diseases, including heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and acute respiratory diseases. Meeting the World Health Organization’s guidelines on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) — the air pollutants posing the greatest health threat — would increase an average person’s life expectancy by almost seven years in Lahore, ten years in Delhi , eight years in Dhaka and three years in Kathmandu. Given the massive population across the region, the aggregate gains in life expectancy would tra...

Author: Marina Yue Zhang, UTS The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) recently released a report asserting China’s dominance in ‘critical technologies’. The report claimed that much of China’s progress has come from elaborate high-level design and long-term policy planning. It also claimed that Western democracies are losing out in global technological competition and urged them to invest more in research and form closer collaborations to curb China’s dominant positions in those technologies. Before action is taken, it is essential to make sense of China’s rise in critical technologies and separate fact from fiction. Claiming that China’s lead in research outputs indicates its dominance in ‘critical technologies’ is a case of equivocation. Research output does not necessarily reflect technological innovation capability. China has undeniably made significant progress in research output over the past two decades, mainly due to substantial funding from the central governmen...