Citing a sharp economic slowdown in India and other emerging markets, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Monday lowered growth estimate for the world economy to 2.9 per cent for 2019. Besides, the International Monetary Fund also trimmed India’s growth estimate to 4.8 per cent for 2019, citing stress in the non-banking financial sector and weak rural income growth.
While the trade war between China and the United States has hogged headlines and driven market anxieties over the past year, an equally large threat to the global economy has gotten little attention: a looming tax war. Since the early twentieth century, countries have largely agreed on how to tax income earned by multinational corporations that conduct business across borders. But this long-standing regime is coming apart, imperiling the broader international economic order.
This second cold war, conducted on a teeming planet whose anxiety is intensified by the passions and rages of social media, is only in its beginning stages. The aim, like in the first Cold War, is negative victory: not defeating the Chinese, but waiting them out, just as we waited the Soviets out.
How Asia is changing and what are the challenges for 2020 … a presidential election year in the United States and how it will change the dynamics between Washington and key Asian capitals after a bruising trade war with China that impacted the global economy. Then there are elections in Taiwan, North Korea.. and other elephants in the room.
The “phase one” trade deal between the United States and China addresses only some of the US government’s concerns, and its remaining demands will be much harder to resolve. But while both America and China have an interest in the success of the open multilateral global trading system, current US policy is undermining that goal.
Trade disputes with the US, concerns about Chinese interference in Hong Kong, and ethnic tensions in Xinjiang all preceded Xi Jinping’s rise to power in late 2012. Their escalation in the last year is a direct result of China’s shift to authoritarianism under Xi.
As to why China and Singapore developed a special relationship can be traced back to the latter’s spectacular economic growth after its independence in 1965. With the exception of three years, Singapore’s economy would grow at an annual rate of over six percent for three decades (and over ten percent for half that time)…That appealed to China, whose communist party in the late 1970s had started a long economic reform process to turn its brand of communism into what would become known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
In this sense, China is acting like the colonialists of old: For nearly a century, Britain, first through the East India Company and then under the Crown, exported its own mediocre men to supposedly civilize the South Asian Raj, contributing to the Empire’s impotence and eventual fall. Today, China is ultimately undermining its efforts to become the globe’s foremost power by shipping abroad its own middling ruralites.
So, the sooner the advanced Western economies that laid the original rules for the WTO get off their pompous high horses, the better. The sooner they recognise that China’s practices do not constitute a unique and existential challenge, but rather raise important 21st-century questions about how original trade rules need to be updated, the better.
A nation that has the aspiration to become a leading power someday cannot continue with unsettled borders, an unintegrated region and under-exploited opportunities. Above all, it cannot be dogmatic in approaching a visibly changing global order. Napoleon once said that history is a version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. The world that awaits us not only calls for fresh thinking, but eventually, a new consensus at home as well. Putting dogmas behind us is a starting point for that journey, says India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar.
