Asia Pacific

On 10 November 2014 a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum will convene in Beijing, followed in rapid succession by the East Asia Summit in Naypyidaw and the G20 in Brisbane.Much of what will be said and done...

APEC leaders will meet in Beijing in November, 25 years after the APEC process was launched in Canberra in 1989. Some early hopes have been met, while others have been dashed. APEC leaders will meet in Beijing in November, 25...

The race is on between the United States and China to dominate the rules-setting game for trade by being the first to be able to announce plans for a free trade area in the Pacific Rim. China hopes to use...

If the APEC meeting can agree on the proposed regional free trade plan and a reasonable implementation schedule, it would take a leap into faster regional growth and prosperity.The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum on November 10-11 will take place...

Regional economic cooperation in Asia and across the Pacific was developed around the idea of open regionalism and building the capacity for regional development in the global, multilateral trading system. Global institutions — the GATT and then the WTO —...

The APEC summit is just over a week away and all stops are out in Beijing to make it an economic and diplomatic triumph, despite the huge underlying challenges in managing China’s relations with the region. The primary goals and...

Launched as a political bloc and security pact in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, ASEAN has evolved to embrace an ambitious economic agenda. Its latest project is to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 31 December 2015. But...

The ASEAN Economic Community, planned to come into effect in 2015, is expected to liberalise goods, capital and skilled labour flows in the ASEAN region. While there has been considerable progress in the area of trade integration, financial integration still...

The rising tensions between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands has led some experts to draw parallels with the Sarajevo incident, which sparked off World War I in Europe. Yet while is a significant risk that the conflict will...

  The risk of conflict in the South China Sea is significant. China claims it has sovereign rights to nearly all of the territory, which is believed to sit atop extensive reserves of oil and gas. The claims are however...

A large proportion of Asian countries are currently at the top of the working-age population hump. For them, the window of opportunity to prepare for an older population will close within the next decade. But how can Asian countries take...

Asia, as a whole, has witnessed tremendous growth in the past decades and city-states such as Hong Kong and Singapore have since joined the ranks of advanced economies. Asian giants are not only home to the largest number of millionaires...

Forty years after China and Japan first commenced normalized diplomatic relations, a group of islands – known as Diaoyu and Senkaku respectively – is now threatening to reignite past rivalries, including both nations’ claims to geopolitical power in the region....

Almost two decades ago, the World Bank published its landmark study “The East Asian Miracle,” analyzing why East Asian economies grew faster than emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. But it is necessary to re-assess economists' focus on...

Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing economic region in the world. Backed by the rapid growth of emerging economies within the region such as China and India, Asia-Pacific is expected to remain as the world’s main economic growth centre, with its...