Fiscal Study

Rising food and commodity prices that are stoking inflation will probably dominate a meeting of the Asian Development Bank as the region's finance ministers seek ways to shield their economies from higher costs, Bloomberg reports:

Japan's Fukushiro Nukaga, China's Xie Xuren, South Korea's Kang Man Soo and Southeast Asian ministers are meeting at the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank's annual gathering in Madrid this weekend. Inflation in Asia is expected to reach a decade-high this year even as economic growth cools, ADB predicts.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 2:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The United Arab Emirates backed its Gulf Arab neighbors in a plan to get a single currency on track, saying it would not adjust the peg linking its dirham to the dollar as the region prepared for a monetary union, International Herald Tribune reports:

Investors scaled back bets that some countries in the area, the world's biggest oil-exporting region, would revalue their currencies unilaterally after Gulf central bankers agreed at a meeting to step up efforts to complete a monetary union by 2010.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kazakhstan's Prime Minister Karim Masimov has announced major energy-related decisions in the wake of President Nursultan Nazarbaev's address to the nation last week. First, and most strikingly, he has ordered the suspension all negotiations with foreign investors on exploration, development and extraction of subsurface natural resources pending the working out of a new tax code, Asia Times writes:

Second, referring to Kazakhstan's recent success in forcing renegotiation of terms for development of the Kashagan offshore oilfield, he has declared that state policy on the "recovery of balance of the country's interests" in "strategic objects" will be continued. Third, he announced that there would soon be created a state trust analogous to KazMunaiGaz but operating "in the sphere of solid [rather than liquid] hydrocarbons", ie mainly oriented towards coal rather than gas and oil. This trust will be created within the existing structure of Samruk Holding.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) hopes to compete negotiations for free trade agreements with six partners by 2013, according to the regional bloc's secretary general, ANTARA news reports:

The 10-member ASEAN is currently holding talks for FTAs with China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.
ASEAN Secretary General Ong Keng Yong said the FTA with South Korea was expected to be completed in 2008, followed by China in 2010, India in 2011 and Japan in 2012.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Foreign investment is suddenly picking up in Indonesia, an indication that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's pro-business policies are finally starting to pay economic dividends in spite of the recent nationalistic and anti-foreign economic regulations passed by Parliament, Asia Times reports:

New business ties with both Japan and China promise to push Indonesia on to a higher economic-growth trajectory in the years ahead. Last week Yudhoyono signed a big new free-trade agreement with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the first wide-ranging bilateral pact Indonesia has ever entered with another country.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 3:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Asian countries were warned against complacency that another Asian financial crisis could not hit the region, International Business Times reports:

"It is important that we make sure that we do not become overconfident that a crisis can never happen," said Thailand's finance minister, Chalongphob Sussangkarn.
He was speaking at a forum in Manila to mark the 10th anniversary of the Asian financial crisis, which was triggered by a large outflow of capital toppling an overvalued Thai baht.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 1:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ten years after Asia's financial crisis, the region is booming again. Has it fully recovered or are economic mistakes being repeated?
IT IS an unhappy anniversary: July 2nd 1997, the official start of the catastrophic Asian financial crisis. On that day Thailand ran out of foreign-exchange reserves trying to defend its currency from a huge speculative attack. It was forced to float the Thai baht, which promptly plunged. The meltdown quickly spread as investors pulled their money out of countries with similar economic symptoms—especially Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea, The Economist reports:

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because of endless reports on conflicts, trafficking, corruption, terrorism and extreme poverty, Central Asia's image is largely negative. When Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to US president Jimmy Carter, spoke about the "Eurasian Balkans" in his book The Grand Chessboard to describe Central Asia, he was contributing to a pejorative stereotype that does not reflect the complex reality, and certainly does not serve the interests of the people living between the Caspian Sea and the Gobi Desert, Asia Times reports:

True, President Hamid Karzai's Afghanistan is far from stable, Pakistan's political situation is fragile, and post-Soviet Central Asia is in a difficult transition, but the region is certainly not in desperate chaos. If one can measure the constructive role played by Xinjiang in the middle of a new Silk Road, and put aside the irrelevant notion of a "Great Game", Central Asia appears as a source of hope and a land of opportunities. One has to rethink Central Asia as a key component of a Eurasian axis of development.

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Posted by fiscalstudy at 6:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)