Global attention is increasingly turning towards Asia as the concurrent rises of China and India signify the nascent stages of the Asian 21st century. As part of this focus, greater reflection is being given to the standing that India and China have held in the past; their natural primacy as great powers in terms of demographics, economic clout […]
Last week, Narendra Modi, a deeply polarizing Indian politician, led his party to a third consecutive election victory in the western state of Gujarat, which he has led for more than a decade. Though regional contests in the country are usually of little interest to outsiders, Mr. Modi’s win is significant because it sets him up as […]
The year 2012 began with festering Chinese sovereignty claims in the South and East China Seas, but also with hope that a code of conduct brokered by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations would enable them to be resolved peacefully. The year is ending, however, with those hopes dashed and ASEAN more divided than it […]
Between 2010 and 2020, Chinese and Indian consumers will spend some $64 trillion on goods and services. Chinese consumers will spend approximately $41.5 trillion, with annual expenditures reaching more than $6 trillion in 2020. Indians will spend $22.5 trillion, with annual spending hitting an estimated $3.6 trillion by 2020. Combined, they will be spending some […]
Europe’s leaders are starting to talk, cautiously, about economic recovery. “Growth is expected to pick up in the second half of 2012 and gather speed in 2013,” Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, wrote in a Dec. 10 column in the Financial Times. Sounds encouraging—but Europe Inc. isn’t buying it. From steelmakers […]
Khin Yu Waddy Myint is manager at Pyrex Trading and Distribution, a Burmese pharmaceutical company that employs 250 people across the country. Part of her job is to source and import medicines from India and Australia, a task she concedes she doesn’t know enough about. “It is the first time for me to learn many […]
Few people are happier to see 2012 end than Hu Jintao, Yoshihiko Noda or Lee Myung Bak. It was a rocky year for the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea, who leave office with legacies in tatters. Gripes about President Hu doing little about China’s biggest challenges outnumbered the accolades. Noda’s premiership ended as ingloriously as those of the […]
One year ago, the chubby and blubbering soon-to-be leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was seen walking alongside the hearse that carried his dead father, Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Un was young, inexperienced, unqualified, and bereft of any of the larger-than-life myths that had sustained his father’s and grandfather’s rules. And yet, […]
The crisis was precipitated by weakness in the global economy and the effects of recent policy errors. Other contributors were the strategies left over from the pre-1991 Soviet-style planning era and the Congress Party’s socialist background and bent toward income redistribution in favor of rural areas instead of economic growth. Furthermore, the elections scheduled for 2014 […]
SOUTH KOREA has elected Park Geun-hye, a 60-year-old conservative, as president for the coming five years. The candidate is from the same party, the Saenuri party, as the incumbent, Lee Myung-bak. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the dictator who set South Korea on the path of break-neck development, seizing power in 1961 and […]
looking beyond borders 