The huge coming out party in Myanmar since 2012 has officially veered into hangover territory. That’s the gist of this Asia Sentinel feature that cites recent World Bank and U.S. State Department warnings about everything from the difficulty of doing business to unproductive investments to infrastructure-related bottlenecks, writes William Pesak Read Here – Bloomberg
Anyone familiar with Singapore knows that race is a national obsession, and far more than a box to be ticked on official forms. Read Here – The Diplomat
A confident-looking Abdel Fattah el-Sisi strides across the tarmac at Almaza Air Base, dressed in a blue blazer and his trademark sunglasses. He is not yet Egypt’s head of state, but certainly looks like one Read Here – Politico
In examining these polls, however, observers ought to be mindful of the fact that election polling in India is a notoriously unreliable exercise. It suffers from the political biases of the polling agencies and news outlets that produce the polls. Read Here – The Diplomat
For months now, protestors have gathered in the capitals of many developing nations—Turkey, Ukraine, Thailand, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Cambodia, among others—in demonstrations united by some key features. Read Here – Businessweek
Ukraine has become a battleground for western influence and Vladimir Putin’s dream of an expanded Russian sphere of influence Read Here – DNA
China has revolution envy. The world’s largest energy consumer wants a natural gas boom to match the speedy transformation in the U.S., where shale gas production more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2012. Read Here – Bloomberg
The “Allah” crisis is masking a nuanced and historic racial debate in Malaysian politics. Read Here – The Diplomat
According to a report in India’s Economic Times, China has offered to finance a large portion of India’s infrastructure development via loans. The investment would amount to 30 percent of India’s planned infrastructure spending through 2017. For comparison, China contributed a mere 0.15 percent of India’s total FDI inflows between April 2000 and December 2013. India has […]
China’s $3.8 trillion of currency reserves are the largest stockpile ever amassed. Economists have long seen that money as a strength — the ultimate rainy-day fund should China’s shadow-banking system blow up. Trouble is, the value of those holdings depends on China’s $1.3 trillion of U.S. Treasuries. If they plunge in value, all hell breaks loose […]
