Brussels has misread Beijing’s global aspirations – there is no grand plan behind Chinese acquisitions of European assets. But, as China becomes a stakeholder in Europe, the continent should adopt a pragmatic strategy to profit from this.
Read Here – South China Morning Post
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Forty years ago Shenzhen was a rural backwater with a population of 20,000, boasting very little industry or agriculture. Communist Beijing was happy to keep it that way for fear its proximity to the freewheeling capitalist colony of Hong Kong made it a security threat. But after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms the town developed rapidly and is arguably surpassing Hong Kong as China’s leading city for industry and technology.
Why is this boom happening? That’s an almost impossible question to answer. Fundamentally, economists don’t know why booms happen. It’s possible that there’s not even such a thing as a “boom” at all — that this is just how the economy works under normal circumstances, when there isn’t a recession or crisis to throw it off its game.
Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Philip Lowe’s speech last week highlighting the risks to the Chinese financial system from shadow banks – non-bank financial institutions often operating in more lightly regulated wholesale markets – has once again drawn attention to the major economic risk in China.
An unprecedented campaign against environmental pollution has led to 18,000 companies being punished across the country since last summer and more plant shutdowns. But the crackdown’s economic implications are just beginning to unfold.
Nobody is going to confuse the dusty fishing village of Duqm for Dubai. But Oman intends to change this by building an entirely new, $10.7 billion transit-oriented industrial city on the desertified coast of the Arabian Sea, 550 kilometers south of Muscat. More accurately, China intends to change this by building an entirely new $10.7 billion transit-oriented industrial city …
A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable.
The “fourth industrial revolution”, an era of unprecedented automation and connectivity, could reshape the urban environment and have profound impacts on society at large.
The name Silk Road conjures images of caravans, desert steppes and adventurers like Marco Polo navigating the ancient trading routes connecting China with Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. China’s modern-day adaptation aims to revive those routes via a network of railways, ports, pipelines and highways.
President Vladimir Putin has set up a twin economic system in Russia. The apolitical part of the economy is subject to the laws of the free market. In parallel to this is the political part of the economy, where large state-owned structures control massive amounts of money flowing into and out of the budget, and is controlled by a handful of his friends, or what we call the “stoligarchs”.
