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 ...

CGTN, 25 September 2020 China’s economy keeps recovering from the coronavirus pandemic-led crisis through the third quarter of 2020, as revealed by the numbers of August activity. Its GDP grew by 3.2% in the second quarter, after falling by 6.8% in the first quarter, in both cases as compared from a year before. It is now the only major economy expected to exhibit growth this year. Successful containment of the pandemics has allowed it to be first-in-first-out relative to others. ...

The crisis of the new Coronavirus is exacerbating the tensions between the United States and China, thus foreshadowing a war without guns, in which the stakes are neither territorial nor ideological, but economic. Having adopted a vehement attitude towards China, well before this crisis, the tenant of the White House has brandished the threat of economic sanctions against China and is pushing towards its isolation on the international scene in order to contain its influence. In cont ...

The worldwide spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has had a severe human impact, mainly in the United States and Europe. For the time being, Africa seems to be less affected, based on the relatively small number of infected people and deaths. Several explanations have been put forward to support this finding, ranging from hot climates to acquired immunity from previous health challenges to traditional miracle cures. In their management of the new epidemic, African countries must logical ...

Analysts are trying to understand why the COVID-19 pandemic is progressing in Africa at a much slower rate than expected. According to one report, the continent had by the beginning of May seen 37,000 infection cases and 1600 fatalities, compared to the rest of the world, which has 3.2 million cases and 228,000 deaths1. Various explanations have been proffered to explain this disparity: Africa’s warm climate, the youthfulness of the continent’s population (60% of the population is u ...

Les rumeurs autour de la pandémie Covid-19, partie de la Chine centrale en minovembre 2019, alimentent plusieurs fantasmes conspirationnistes. Il s’agit, notamment, d’hypothèse d’attaque biologique sur fond d’une guerre commerciale ou d’une fuite du pathogène SARS Co-V2 d’un programme biologique chinois. En marge de cette spirale, au demeurant spéculative, se réactualise le débat sur l’emploi des armes biologiques. En fait, plusieurs germes pathogènes d’origine naturelle, génétique ...

Jamais dans l’Histoire de l’humanité la configuration d’un ennemi commun à toutes les nations ne s’était produite. La crise pandémique du Coronavirus ne guète pas une race, une religion ou une couleur en particulier. Celui qui est menacé est bien l’espèce humaine dans sa totalité. C’est une guerre d’un contre tous. Or, plutôt que d’apporter une réponse commune, les Etats fonctionnent en isolation clinique et le système institutionnel, aussi bien multilatéral que régional, peine à co ...

A feeling of collective insanity has overtaken the world since the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-2019) emerged in Wuhan, China. The virus—more lethal than influenza—was initially treated lightly by the West. This approach showed the lack of preparedness of many countries in dealing with the epidemics we are currently facing. Instead of implementing immediate measures to deal with the challenges imposed, some political and business leaders started labeling COVID-19 as the Chinese v ...

The outbreak in China has already affected economic sectors in Latin America. Is there more to come? China’s economy has come to a sudden stop. Large parts of the country remain in shutdown mode after the end of the Lunar New Year holiday, with national passenger traffic declining by 85% on the Wednesday after the break compared to 2019.   Outside of China, the impact of the slowdown has already been felt, with companies like Apple and Land Rover warning o ...

China and the European Union have an extensive and growing economic relationship. The relationship is problematic because of the distortions caused by China’s state capitalist system and the diversity of interests within the EU’s incomplete federation. More can be done to capture the untapped trade and investment opportunities that exist between the parties. China’s size and dynamism, and its recent shift from an export-led to a domesticdemand- led growth model, mean that these oppo ...

The growth slowdown became evident in late 2017. World GDP at market exchange rates slowed from a seasonally adjusted annual rate of between 4 and 5% in the second half of 2017 to between 1.5% to 2% in the first half of 2019. The slowdown came as a big surprise and led to continuous revisions downwards of growth forecasts as shown yet again by the IMF’s World Economic Outlook issued last week. Nearly all observers and experts had expected the expansion of 2016/2017 to con ...

The Trump government has been imposing restrictions on access to technologies by Chinese telecommunications firms. Why and what are the consequences? The Federal Communications Commission is about to ban carriers from using government funds to buy equipment from Huawei and ZTE. Other government agencies are expected to take similar measures. This is just the latest episode of a gradual squeeze that the Trump government has been giving over China's telecommunications giant Huawei, ...

Decades of rapid economic growth have dramatically expanded China’s energy needs. The magnitudes are impressive. China is now the world’s largest consumer of energy, the largest producer and consumer of coal, and the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. It is increasingly looking toward securing its future energy needs with sustainable alternatives. China has also become the world’s largest producer, exporter and installer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, ...