Economics & Business Archive

Although President Donald Trump has not conceded the United States presidential election and is mounting multiple dubious legal challenges to the results, President-elect Joe Biden is moving ahead with the transition. While Biden did not focus on Southeast Asia during his time as vice president from 2009 until 2017, he probably has more extensive foreign policy experience than any incoming president in decades, save perhaps George H. W. Bush. In addition, his policy team includes a deep bench of experts on the Asia-Pacific region. When it comes to Biden’s approach to Southeast Asia, persistent tensions in the U.S. relationship with […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. When the huge Pacific Rim trade deal formerly known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership was first proposed, many Chinese observers saw it as a U.S. attempt to economically contain and exclude China. They worried that, with a new, American-led trade bloc surrounding China, Chinese exports would become less attractive throughout Asia. Because of the TPP’s rigorous terms as a high-standard trade deal, […]

Jutting into the Atlantic Ocean 65 miles south of Lisbon, Portugal’s Sines peninsula has long been recognized by foreign powers for its geostrategic importance. The Romans, Visigoths and Moors all established settlements alongside the natural deepwater port. Today, however, plans to redevelop the port have become the latest source of friction between the U.S. and China, suggesting that Portugal’s diplomatic strategy of courting both rivals is running out of runway. Sines is the closest port in mainland Europe to America’s eastern shale basins. U.S. firms want to expand the port’s liquid natural gas terminal in order to increase gas exports […]

President-elect Joe Biden is about to inherit a trade dispute that gives him an early chance to show whether he is prepared to break not just with Donald Trump, but with the corporate-friendly trade policies championed by his Democratic predecessors. The outgoing administration is set to impose new tariffs over France’s recent decision to tax the revenue of U.S. digital giants like Facebook, Apple and Google, charging that the move discriminates against U.S. companies. For Trump, the fight is a simple matter of protecting the profits of rich American companies against what he sees as a European cash grab. Barack […]

The architects of India’s foreign policy have long preferred a multipolar world. They believe that India, with its limited economic and military capabilities, can play a prominent role on the global stage only when it is not dominated by one or two superpowers. That view led New Delhi to champion the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, and a preference for multipolarity endured in Indian foreign policy thinking after the fall of the Soviet Union. Even while India in the 21st century drew closer to the sole remaining superpower, the United States, its leaders spoke of strategic autonomy, which some […]

Once relatively staid, the global economic and trade system has been anything but since U.S. President Donald Trump took office. Though it’s been overshadowed by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S.-China trade war has not been definitively resolved. In January, the two countries hit the pause button on the on again, off again dispute, which began in 2018 when Trump launched a series of tit-for-tat tariff hikes over China’s unfair trade practices, including forced technology transfers and the theft of intellectual property. After several rounds of talks stalled over the course of the following 18 months, the two […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. Sealed at a virtual signing ceremony Sunday, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, now the world’s largest trading bloc, has been eight years in the making. It encompasses the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam—and five of their major trading partners, in Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and […]

Editor’s Note: This will be Kimberly Ann Elliott’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Kim for all of her insights into economic policy over the past two and a half years, in which she has made sense of tumultuous trade news and offered readers a sharp, lively guide to Donald Trump’s trade wars. The World Trade Organization had plenty of problems before the United States elected an isolationist president determined to put “America first” and go it alone in 2016. Four years ago, the WTO could point to only a few […]

Cuba’s economy was already struggling before the coronavirus pandemic, due to persistently poor domestic productivity, declining oil shipments from Venezuela and the ratcheting up of U.S. sanctions. But now, the closure of the tourist sector due to COVID-19 has thrown Cuba into a full-fledged recession, deeper than anything since the economic crisis of the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—what Cubans know as the “Special Period.” Perhaps paradoxically, the downturn also appears to have broken a logjam of disagreement among Cuba’s senior leaders and accelerated the implementation of economic reforms. Reforms entail risks, President Miguel Diaz-Canel told […]

As authorities around the world seek out new tools to fight COVID-19, they are increasingly turning to contact-tracing apps and other technological tools that carry worrying implications for online privacy and digital rights. Meanwhile, a recent report from the watchdog group Freedom House warns that many authoritarian governments are seizing on the pandemic to expand their surveillance powers and crack down on online dissent, while imposing new restrictions on the flow of information across national borders. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, Freedom House’s Adrian Shahbaz, one of the report’s co-authors, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman to talk about how […]

Many aspects of our response to the coronavirus pandemic have relied on digital technology. Schools and workplaces are moving online, holding classes and meetings using virtual tools. Public health experts are using data analytics and contact tracing apps to slow the contagion. And in some cases, authoritarian governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to impose sweeping restrictions on their citizens that limit their scope for protests and other forms of criticism. According to researchers at the watchdog group Freedom House, the implications of the pandemic for digital rights worldwide are bleak. The organization released a new report last […]

Donald Trump has been an unorthodox president, to say the least. Much of America and the rest of the world is hoping for a return to some semblance of normality under President-elect Joe Biden. But what might that mean on trade? The traditional take on American trade politics for decades has been that Republicans tend to be free traders while Democrats are more skeptical. Trump certainly turned that on its head. Yet after he started imposing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in imports, several polls—which obviously have to be taken with a grain of salt—showed most Americans becoming […]

Longtime opposition leader Wavel Ramkalawan was sworn in as president of the Seychelles late last month, after a decisive election victory over incumbent President Danny Faure. Ramkalawan’s coalition, the Seychelles Democratic Alliance—known in Seychellois Creole as the Linyon Demokratik Seselwa, or LDS—also expanded its majority in parliament. In an email interview with WPR, Yolanda Sadie, a professor of politics at the University of Johannesburg, discusses what led to Ramkalawan’s victory and the many challenges facing his new government. World Politics Review: What is the historical significance of Ramkalawan’s presidency? Yolanda Sadie: Ramkalawan’s election victory, in his sixth attempt, was the […]

After nearly a decade of effort, Latin America is on the verge of realizing its first regional environmental treaty. The Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, better known as the Escazu Agreement, has 24 signatories, 10 of which have ratified it—just one less than is needed for it to enter into force. Curiously though, Chile, one of the countries that spearheaded negotiations over the pact, is missing from the list of signatories, an omission that calls into question its mostly positive record on addressing climate change. Negotiations […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. Last week, the Communist Party’s Central Committee held one of the most important events on China’s political calendar, meeting for its fifth plenum. From Oct. 26 to 29, the conclave of senior party officials discussed the blueprint of the country’s 14th five-year plan and set out long-range objectives for 2035. Those who are tracking policy aims that have been set out […]

Today is Election Day in the United States, when Americans will render their verdict on the presidency of Donald Trump. When Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, he famously asked voters to consider whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier, when his opponent, Jimmy Carter, took office. It appears from polls that many Americans will base their vote on Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But changes to trade policy were a central part of Trump’s campaign to “make America great again,” so it’s fair to ask what Trump has delivered. Last […]

Google recently announced it will enforce rules enabling it to take a 30 percent cut from app purchases in its Google Play Store starting next September, a controversial revenue-generating policy that Apple also uses in its App Store. Both tech giants are facing anti-trust lawsuits over the practice. Also this fall, Ukrainian authorities ordered Apple to remove the apps of Russian propaganda outlets from its store, which Russia’s Foreign Ministry called “another manifestation of the Ukrainian authorities’ repressive policy towards the media.” The move follows other actions by the Ukrainian government in recent years to restrict Russian state media outlets’ […]