Americans are buying more goods as importers continue seeing lower prices.
Retail sales rose 0.2% on a month-over-month basis in January, according to a new report by the Census Bureau. They rose 3.1% from a year ago, with an 8.7% increase in non-store retailers. Sporting goods, hobby, book and music stores showed a surprisingly strong increase, rising 9.1% from the same period a year ago.
Anyone familiar with quantifying gross domestic product (GDP) knows that at times it is more an art than a science. This is often particularly true in developing nations, where limited access to sophisticated technologies and practices make reporting difficult and the chances of “rigging” quite prominent.
However, the World Bank’s Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Kaushik Basu, has come to the defense of India in particular, saying that their self-reported GDP estimates are beyond reproach.
Malaysia’s leadership must be extremely satisfied on two counts: their success in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the parliament’s favourable position on the agreement.
It is amazing that Malaysia has negotiated to preserve the Bumiputera agenda, obtain a minimum five-year grace period to reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and gain exemption for Khazanah from investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions for two years after the deal comes into force.
India’s 2015–2020 foreign trade policy aims to increase merchandise exports from US$450 billion in 2013–14 to US$750 billion by 2020. This will be difficult to achieve. More than a year of negative exports growth has raised concerns about India’s ability to boost exports and to achieve and sustain its current 8 percent growth rate.
As the Communist Party of Vietnam prepared for its five-year national congress, suspense built over who would take over the party’s helm. When the curtain was finally lifted on 25 January 2016, supporters of populist Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung were disappointed to find that conservative incumbent Nguyen Phu Trong had won a second term.
1) Indonesia announced it will allow full foreign ownership in many local industries in an effort to boost foreign investment, 2) The Thai military government called a referendum on the new constitution on July 31, 3) Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party dropped its backing for candidate Wnorowski to join the MPC, 4) The IMF is starting to warn Ukraine, 5) Press reports suggest some slippage in Brazil’s fiscal consolidation efforts, 6) Mexico’s Finance Minister Videgaray acknowledged spending cut will be needed to maintain budgetary discipline, 7) Elsewhere, Mexico’
On 14 January 2016, Indonesian supporters of so-called Islamic State (IS) militant group launched a coordinated bomb and gun assault in the heart of Jakarta. The attack is a game changer for terrorism in Indonesia. However, Indonesia’s leaders are closing ranks as the government of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) pursues a long-term response to the growing IS threat in the region.
The day after the 12th national Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), the Bank of Investment and Development of Vietnam announced the suspension of its two governing board members. The men allegedly committed ‘wrongdoings in management’, a term usually used by the authorities for offences associated with corruption. It is hard to know the exact reason this case was made public, particularly given recent rumours of political infighting within the CPV.
A report from the Chamber of Mines highlights that copper production in the Democratic Republic of Congo dropped to its lowest level in six years in 2015, and, according to Reuters, 2016 could yield lackluster results. The Central African country relies on mining for 20 percent of GDP, with such minerals as cobalt and copper comprising over 70 percent of exports alone. The government expects the economy to improve in the coming years as new mining operations come online.
Australia’s 2015 Intergenerational Report assumed that labour productivity would grow at an average annual rate of 1.5 percent over the period 2015 to 2055. This is slightly lower than the growth in labour productivity over the last decade because multifactor productivity has stagnated.
