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, ...

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution of manufacturing employment across the world. Manufacturing value added has grown rapidly since 2000, at least matching world GDP growth, even after the global financial crisis, reflecting mainly rising demand for manufactures especially in developing countries. However, manufacturing employment increased at only a slow pace, both before and after the global financial crisis. Manufacturing employment growth provided o ...

There is no doubt that China's 70th Anniversary celebration was the display of a new world superpower. From the military parade to the issuance of a paper reporting China's role in the New Era, it is clear that the country, whose current political system was established on 1 October 1949, is much different, more assertive and with a clear perspective of the role it wants to play in the international scenario. Everywhere in Beijing, the Chinese National Anthem was played, r ...

Despite some short-term benefits, trade deviation to the region shouldn’t be expected to last. Has the U.S. trade war with China been good for Latin America? An increase in Chinese demand for primary products from the region, as well as recent news of production transfers from China to Mexico, might give the impression that it has. But any positive short-term effects of the confrontation should also take into account its negative medium- and long-term impacts on the region and on gl ...

Thirty months into President Trump's radical trade policy, it is time to take stock. American firms tend to give the President the benefit of the doubt - that the aim is not protection (which most don't want) but opening up markets overseas, striking better trade deals, and reducing the nation's big trade deficit. So far, however, none of this has happened. Instead, there is virulent uncertainty, barriers against American firms are going up, Europe, Japan and China have struck impor ...

China’s economic records over the past four decades generated the intellectual curiosity of many foreign observers and researchers . The development pathway of Beijing is interesting to study as it proves that a country can take its destiny in its own hand. This paper tries to draw possible lessons from the Chinese development path to see if some of them could be adaptable to feed the development of the African countries. Introduction Forty years ago, China opened up its economy t ...

From 2010 onwards, China has become a relevant foreign investor in Brazil, mainly through State-owned companies investing in infrastructure – particularly in the energy sector. In the first years of the current decade, Chinese investment has been widely welcomed in an environment characterized by declining investment rates and low economic growth. However, more recently, some concerns have been raised of an “excessive” dependence of China state companies in sectors perceived as stra ...

The world is navigating through turbulent waters, witnessing one the most significant transitions ever in its history. With the ascension of China and the steady decline of the United States, there is a general sense of insecurity and fear about the future and the unknown. Change is never a comfortable period due to the turmoil it frequently generates. The relationship between the United States and China will never be the same, but it will not end up in war, as some expect ...

There is no doubt that the ascension of China, which is at the centre of the global debate, is the most relevant fact of the 21st century. A rising power with many vulnerabilities, yet a clear understanding of what they are and with the willingness to actively reduce them to a minimum, manageable level. China has managed to become, after all, the second largest economy in the world, with outstanding economic performance. Globalisation has brought China from the periphery into the co ...

In a recent brief, titled” The Crisis in World Trade”, my co-authors and I conclude that whether we still have a rules-based system a few years from now depends on the answer to three questions: Can the WTO be revitalized? Is protectionism in the United States a temporary aberration? Will China reform and fit the liberal economic order? If the answer to these three questions is yes, the system will likely endure. If the answer is no, we will return to the power based non system ...

The world trading system has been remarkably successful in many respects but is presently under tremendous strain. The causes are deep-seated and require a strategic response. The future of the system depends critically on reinvigorating the WTO and policy change in the largest trading nations. Important measures are required to sustain the multilateral trading system, and urgent action is needed to avoid a scenario where the system fragments. The worst scenarios will disrupt global ...

The trade tensions between the United States and China will cause only minor immediate damage to their giant economies. However, tariffs have important and diverse effects on individual sectors and cause heightened uncertainty. The main adverse effects on Sub-Saharan Africa will therefore be through global investor confidence, economic growth and commodity prices, and these effects could be severe if the dispute escalates further and endangers the rules-based trading system. The tra ...

Reform and Opening-up profoundly altered the face of China. From an agricultural backwards country, which had suffered humiliation by Western powers and Japan in the 19thand early 20th century, to the largest economy in the world in Purchasing Power Parity terms, the Chinese saga for reinsertion into the global scene is not a miracle. It is the result of hard work, visionary leadership and the wise use of its most widely available commodity: its hard-working people. Of course, there ...