Japan Inc is charging into Myanmar. The rush began one night last October, when Myanmar’s new president rolled out a map after dinner to show an aging Japanese power broker a prize that could be Tokyo‘s to develop – a swathe of land nearly as big as Macau. Thein Sein, 67, a former general, had been […]
When Xiaobo Zhang got married in the early 1990s, he and his bride, like millions of other couples across China, were given a small room to live in by his danwei, or work unit. At the time a lecturer at Nankai University in Tianjin, Zhang’s room was utilitarian and unremarkable, virtually indistinguishable from the ones inhabited […]
“Brand Japan” has long benefited from the strength of Japanese companies in industries as diverse as automotives and music, or “J-pop.” The recent situation in China shows how that close association can also hurt businesses when nationalist sentiments go against them. As big businesses — fairly or unfairly — become the short-term targets of populist […]
Every big financial crisis has its own defining characteristics, but both in origin and consequence, such implosions tend to be remarkably similar. In virtually every case, you first see a long period of excess in financial risk-taking, where credit spirals out of control. This ultimately proves unsustainable, and in the resulting bust the process of […]
The biggest problem facing the global economy is not climate change, trade imbalances, financial regulation, or the eurozone. It is short-term thinking. An epidemic of myopia has swept over the world in the past few decades, and it threatens our living standards like nothing else. t’s an epidemic with more than one cause, and not […]
HER voice is high and birdlike. Tiny, she is fond of finger wagging. Her party, the Trinamool Congress, has just 19 of the national parliament’s 543 elected members. She offers little beyond vague talk of the “common man”, and after a year running West Bengal she looks ill-at-ease in office. Yet Mamata Banerjee feels she […]
The fight against Somali-based pirates is becoming a private battle as global defence cuts reduce naval counter-piracy deployments. Because governments have struggled to contain the spread of piracy in the Indian Ocean, shipping companies have turned to private military security companies to guarantee the safety of their crews and cargo. Private armed teams have proliferated […]
The situation in East Asia is tense. Japan and China, two of the most powerful countries in the world, are locked in a bitter dispute over eight tiny, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. The volatility of the issue — compounded by the fact that the waters around the islands are rich in natural resources — is […]
A strong argument in favour of FDI in mammoth retail is that it will generate employment. Surely, it will. But we can’t let the question lie there. We must ask, for whom? Will it source employees from the unskilled, illiterate vegetable vendors who, akin to a capillary network, are spread across the length and breadth […]
When the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt, there was fear that draconian social measures would be pursued, thereby killing the country’s important tourism industry. Instead, the party has attempted to portray a moderate face, and more aggressively, tout itself as an administration willing to cut lucrative deals. While the politics of the Brotherhood remain […]
looking beyond borders 