Is ASEAN an Affinity Group? What Exchange Rates Tell Us
As we stumble out of the global COVID-19 pandemic, we need to examine how our economies have changed. In East Asia, the pandemic may result in higher costs for travel. In addition, the well-publicized disruptions to supply chains may not prove transi...
A Highly Unequal Crisis: Covid-19's Disproportionate Effects on Southeast Asia's Workers
Co-authors: Souleima El Achkar Hilal; Ian Nicole Generalao; and Rosa Mia AraoThis post draws from a paper presented in the ACAES session at the 2022 Allied Social Science Association Annual Meeting, program here. Youtube recording here.
Economics of the Pandemic, 2021
Updated 2 May to incorporate full year data for 2021.A previous post analyzing the economics of the pandemic for 2020 documented widely divergent experiences in Asia with respect to case numbers, mobility loss, and export impact, and showed all three...
Emerging Asia: Hard Road Ahead?
In recent years, emerging market countries—in particular, those in Asia—have been among the global economy’s star performers. Even during bad times, such as during the Global Financial Crisis, Asian EMs have seen their economies hol...
Review of Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy
Routledge, May 2021.Isabella M. Weber’s “How China Escaped Shock Therapy” is a painstakingly researched but fundamentally flawed account of one key thread of the economic reform debates that took place in China during the 1980&rsquo...
The Complicated Question of COVID-19 vs The Economy
The logic is straightforward that policy interventions that seek to break the chain of COVID infection also lower economic activity. Frictions in value creation result from limiting operations for dining and entertainment outlets, curtailing travel, ...
ASSA 2022 Panel on Covid & Recovery in Asia
UPDATE: Our session presentations are posted on the ACAES Youtube channel as follows:Covid-19 and Labor Market Adjustments in Southeast Asia Presenter: Sameer Khatiwada, Asian Development Bank Discussant: Shaianne Osterreich, Ithaca College
The Economic Costs of Low-Level Hostility in the Western Pacific
The western Pacific Ocean is not literally pacific—it is not peaceful. In the south, overlapping claims to rocky islets have led to clashes over oil and gas reserves and fishery resources between a half dozen countries. In the north, there are also c...
Is It Tantrum Time Again?
In May 2013, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, hinted at the possibility of the Fed reducing (“tapering”) its purchases of government bonds sooner than previously expected, leading to a reassessment of th...