China

As China’s presence has expanded into the Horn of Africa, Somaliland has opted to distance itself from Beijing and presented itself as a democratic ally of the West – and Taiwan. On March 17, 2022, three Republican Congressmen introduced a bill titled the “Somaliland Partnership Act,” requiring the American Secretary of State to submit annual reports to Congress on assistance provided to Somaliland and conduct a feasibility study on establishing a security partnership with Somalilan ...

Emerging market and developing economies (EMDE) face a common set of external shocks: rising energy and food prices; tightening in global financial conditions caused by the prospect of sharper interest rate hikes and anticipation of "quantitative tightening"; and return of restrictions on mobility in China, on account of the Covid zero policy, leading to slumping in growth and weakening one of the primary growth drivers for the other EMDE. However, the impacts of those common shocks ...

The White House  classified the speech as “remarks by President Obama to the People of Africa”, their representatives gathered at Mandela Hall, Addis Ababa,  Ethiopia, July 28, 2015. It was the first address by a US-President to the African Union. He was standing before the audience as “a proud American” and “the son of an African”. His father, Barack Hussein Obama, who grew up near a small village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, won a scholarship to study economics and made h ...

Not all is quiet on the Chinese/Chinese front. Warships are sailing through the Taiwan Strait. One day, an American missile guided US destroyer, the next a Canadian Frigate, some Chinese submarines, or one of Beijing’s new aircraft carriers. Shadows of a new cold war, possibly turning into an unpredictable escalation. America’s National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Scott Neuman stated (October 6, 2021), “Taiwan says tensions with China are at their worst in 4 decades.” With the situ ...

Concerns are real, but the country fares as well as peers at similar levels of development China holds a paradox: Western policy-makers and many firms decry discriminatory business practices — concerns that have culminated in a trade war between the US and China — yet foreign direct investment (FDI) in China continues to thrive. In the first quarter of this year, FDI into China soared by 40% compared to the same period a year prior and, as reported by Unctad, the country overt ...

On July 21, the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) published its eighth annual report on Global Public Investors (GPI). It included a survey the asset allocation plans of reserve managers of central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension funds. Together, the 102 investors who responded to the survey manage $42.7 trillion in assets (Figure 1). Source: OMFIF analysis (GPI 2021).   The survey highlighted notable changes in the composition of p ...

For years, no one knew why dozens of battered wooden ghost boats, often with the corpses of North Korean fishermen, whose starved bodies were reduced to skeletons, routinely washed up on the Japanese coast, wrote Ian Urbina in an August 2020 report for Yale University’s 360 environment project. The explanation, he said, could be that “China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, forcing out smaller North Korea ...

China is the world's largest exporter of goods. It is also, by any plausible criterion, a developing country. China's dual status needs to be better reflected in Chinese policies - recognizing its global responsibilities -- and in those of the Western powers - recognizing China's limitations. Across three important agendas - macroeconomics, development assistance, and climate - important differences between China and the West remain, yet none of these issues appears intractable. ...

Commodity prices have recovered their 2020 losses and, in most cases, are now above pre-pandemic levels (Figure 1). The pace of Chinese growth since 2020 and the economic recovery that has accompanied vaccine rollouts in advanced companies are seen as driving demand upward, while supply restrictions for some items—oil, copper, and some food products—have favored their upward adjustment. Some analysts have started to speak of the possibility of a new commodity price ‘super-cycle’ af ...