Anticipating a yawning divergence of monetary policy between the world’s largest central banks, market participants continued to drive the dollar higher over the past week. In fact, the greenback appreciated against all the major and emerging market currencies except the Malaysian ringgit and South Korean won.
As the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) takes steps toward implementing the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by the end of 2015, they should be cognisant that the paths towards economic integration and sustainable urbanisation are closely intertwined. Southeast Asian cities will play a critical role in the unfolding of the AEC.
On 1 November 2015, Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye convened in Seoul, South Korea for the Sixth Trilateral Summit. The meeting was the first after political and historical disputes led to a three-year hiatus, of what was supposed to be an annual summit. At the 1 November summit, the leaders issued a joint declaration announcing that trilateral cooperation had been ‘completely restored’ and pledged to resolutely sustain such cooperation.
On 29 September, President Enrique Peña Nieto formally launched an initiative he had first announced in November 2014 to create, for the first time in Mexico, three special economic zones (SEZs) in the country’s poorest states. The next day, Peña Nieto submitted to Congress the draft of the law that will set the rules and conditions for the creation and operation of these zones.
With the ECB poised to take additional steps down the unorthodox monetary policy route, financial and economic forces are as potent as ever. However, there is a subtle shift, taking place that few seem to recognize. It is the re-emergence of non-economic/non-financial issues.
Since the Great Financial Crisis began, and especially since the emergence of the European debt problems, economics have been paramount in Europe. Even political developments were understood in relation to the economic and financial problems.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) handed down a ruling against the United States, finding that a program implemented decades ago in an effort to save dolphins amounts to a “technical barrier to trade.” Mexico initiated the case against the US.
The program in question, started in 1990, created a “dolphin-safe” label that could be applied to tuna to notify consumers that the product was caught in a manner designed to avoid killing dolphins. In the wild, and more particularly in the Pacific, tunas and dolphins often swim in the same areas.
The US dollar remains firm, even if it has eased from its seven-month high against the euro and five-year high against the Swiss franc recorded yesterday. The US October personal consumption expenditure was disappointing, and prompted some downward revision to Q4 GDP forecasts.
Relations between the US and South Africa have hit another low in a series of trade disputes that go as far back as 2003. While strengthening its relations with other countries, the US has threatened to suspend South Africa from its preferential trade programme for Africa due to its failure to comply with the latest terms of the African Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA).
At the beginning of October, 12 Pacific Rim countries agreed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. The TPP agreement has been hailed as a landmark trade pact, as it includes many issues that have so far not found their way into the rule of law in the multilateral trading system.
Chinese Vice-President Li Yuanchao paid a high-profile visit to India from 3–7 November 2015. This was the first time that a Chinese Vice President paid a state visit to India. The visit followed two other high profile events: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in September 2014 and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reciprocal visit to China in May 2015. What explains these recent burgeoning relations between these two former adversaries?
