Author : East Asia Forum

On 25 August 2015, Singapore’s President Tony Tan officially dissolved the parliament, triggering early parliamentary elections. While these elections, by law, could have waited until January 2017, 2015 is...

On 11 August, the Japanese government went along with its plan to revive nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster by restarting one of the Sendai nuclear power plants. Prime...

It ain’t easy being an autocrat. Take China’s current President and Party Secretary, Xi Jinping. Since coming to power, Xi has shown himself to be unhindered by former norms...

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently said with reference to China’s President Xi Jinping ‘Are you starting to have the feeling that when it comes to economic policy...

Many observers tend to assume that India will play a large and growing part as a great power in a wider ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategic system, that it will use its...

South Korean President Park Geun-hye will visit China from September 2–4 to attend Beijing’s official activities to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, including...

East Asian financial cooperation is at a crossroads. The Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) and its surveillance unit — the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) — are continuing to...

In September 2013, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to create a society in which ‘all women can shine’. Abe acknowledged that women had long been an underutilised resource...

Southeast Asia looks set to usher in a new era of cooperation and stability following the ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in early August. But significant...

South Korea’s economic growth has slowed significantly since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The five-year average GDP growth rate was 7.9 percent during 1991–95, but dropped substantially to 4.5...