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Navigating Prosperity and Security in East Asia »
Publication date: May 2023
The world’s two largest economies, the United States and China, are locked in a trade war, complicating policy choices internationally. These choices are sharper for the countries of East and Southeast Asia than they are elsewhere, because the multilateral rules-based economic order on which East Asian economic integration and cooperation is built is under threat.
Economic policy has never been separate from security considerations. For decades, the national security risks inherent in economic exchange have been mitigated under a US-led system that allowed the strengthening of economic ties, including between China and the rest of the world. But economics and security are increasingly entangled in a way that is damaging to both, creating a dangerous trade-off. Now, as global uncertainties grow, the risks of international exchange—rather than its benefits—are beginning to dominate the calculus for some policymakers.
Against this backdrop, how can Southeast Asian countries and US allies in Asia balance their security interests and their economic interests? And how can these countries, individually and collectively, broaden their policy options and deepen economic integration? This volume investigates the domestic and international dimensions of these questions.
More Than Fiscal »
The Intergenerational Report, Sustainability and Public Policy in Australia
Publication date: May 2023
Every five years, the Australian treasurer is required to publish an intergenerational report (IGR), which examines the long-term sustainability of current government policies and seeks to determine how demographic, technological and other structural trends might affect the economy and the budget in coming decades. Despite these lofty objectives, the five IGRs produced from 2002 have received only muted applause. Critics say that they are too mechanical, too narrow and too subject to the views of the government of the day and that they don’t provide the intended wake-up call for public understanding of looming economic, social and environmental issues.
This analysis of the most recent IGR (2021) is based on a workshop hosted by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. While finding that the 2021 IGR is an improvement on the previous report (2015), the authors identify several fiscal and broader policy issues that deserve greater attention, including Australia’s structural deficit, rising inequality and the impacts of climate change. They argue that the report fails to discuss the policies required to support greater resilience against future shocks, including the case for earlier budget repair. They propose that future IGRs be prepared with greater independence, cover all levels of government, have more transparent analysis and draw upon a wider ‘wellbeing’ approach to long-term sustainability.
This book aims to attract close attention from public officials and politicians and generate constructive debate in the community.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 15, Number 1, 2023 »
Publication date: March 2023
While many rejoice in something like ‘normality’ after the years of disruption caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic, the world will not resume its former shape. Nowhere is this more evident than in China. After the disastrous economic performance of 2022, a recalibration of China’s policies was essential—including by retreating from zero-COVID and, under the banner of ‘Chinese-style modernisation’, relaxing restrictions on the free market. China’s greatest post-pandemic challenge, however, will be the terms of its engagement with the outside world. Its claims to both developing-nation status and global leadership define China, some say, as an ‘anxious adolescent superpower’. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly canvasses a range of shifts in Chinese society and daily life as well as policy direction: describing women’s leading role in the calls for social change, explaining how China’s demographic crunch is unlikely to affect its economic modernisation over the coming two decades, examining the difficulties faced by rural migrants and in investing in the education of the rural young, and detailing the public response to the poorly understood social credit system.
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East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 14, Number 4, 2022 »
Publication date: December 2022
Southeast Asian nations have long understood that effective national security goes well beyond military preparedness, encompassing a variety of ‘non-traditional’ security issues. This idea is at the heart of political cooperation within ASEAN and competes with traditional notions of regional security in East Asia. But the vocabulary that has developed in the face of growing geopolitical tensions—decoupling, dual circulation, friendshoring, ‘strategic’ supply chains, securitisation—suggests that the big powers are working towards their own notion of comprehensive security.
Contributors to this issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly recognise that comprehensive regional security—an approach that embraces economic, environmental and energy security as well as military interests and considers how they are secured within today’s economically interdependent and politically cooperative regional system—can only be secured collectively: one country’s resilience to climate change, or its access to free and well-served markets for energy and food, cannot come at the expense of others.
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China’s Transition to a New Phase of Development »
Edited by: Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou
Publication date: November 2022
The Chinese economy is currently undergoing fundamental changes. In this context, the 2022 China Update examines the key characteristics of China’s transition towards a new phase of economic growth and development. This year’s update book covers a range of diverse topics that reflect the complex and changing nature of the economy. It explores critical questions: Why does China need a new development paradigm, and what is the best way to achieve it? What are China’s choices when faced with the restructuring of global industrial value chains? What key roles will domestic consumption play in the next phase of China’s development? What does the digital transformation mean for the Chinese economy? What has been the domestic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on income inequality and labour market outcomes? What pathways exist for China in its transition towards carbon neutrality? How does China’s emissions-trading market compare with that of Europe? How will China’s carbon neutrality strategy affect the Australian economy? What are the political factors influencing bilateral trade flows between China and its trading partners? And what is at stake for China–US relations?
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 14, Number 3, 2022 »
Publication date: September 2022
Japan ‘crossed the Rubicon’ after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unlike eight years ago when Russia annexed Crimea, the Kishida government quickly implemented sanctions against Russia with other Western countries. Japanese people have generally stood behind the Kishida government’s foreign and security policy activism, yet uncertainties about Japan’s future remain. Can Japan confront ‘a three-front war’ against China, North Korea and Russia? How can Japan manage its relations with the United States and China amidst great power competition and a growing risk of military conflict? How can it cope with inflation, energy shortages, global warming and the crisis of the nuclear non-proliferation regime? Domestically, Japan has yet to escape from the impact of COVID-19. Maintaining international competitiveness in an era of ageing and shrinking population remains a top priority for Japan. The articles in this EAFQ examine the challenges and opportunities facing Japan and explore its future in an era of growing uncertainty.
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Capital and Inequality in Rural Papua New Guinea »
Edited by: Bettina Beer, Tobias Schwoerer
Publication date: July 2022
That large-scale capital drives inequality in states like Papua New Guinea is clear enough; how it does so is less clear. This edited collection presents studies of the local contexts of capital-intensive projects in the mining, oil and gas, and agro-industry sectors in rural and semi-rural parts of Papua New Guinea; it asks what is involved when large-scale capital and its agents begin to become significant nodes in hitherto more local social networks. Its contributors describe the processes initiated by the (planned) presence of extractive industries that tend to reinforce already existing inequalities, or to create and socially entrench novel inequalities.
The studies largely focus on the beginnings of such transformations, when hopes for social improvement are highest and economic inequalities still incipient. They show how those hopes, and the encompassing socio-political transformations characteristic of this phase, act to produce far-reaching impacts on ways of life, setting precedents for and embedding the social distribution of gains and losses. The chapters address a range of settings: the PNG Liquid Natural Gas pipeline; newly established eucalyptus and oil palm plantations; a planned copper-gold mine; and one in which rumours of development diffuse through a rural social network as yet unaffected by any actual or planned capital investments. The analyses all demonstrate that questions around land, leadership and information are central to the current and future social profile of local inequality in all its facets.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 14, Number 2, 2022 »
Publication date: June 2022
Once, the internet and world wide web promised a world of seamless connectivity for anyone with access to a digital device. As connectivity costs fell, the workplace became mobile, and digitalisation transformed industrial sectors, the laissez-faire agenda of digital developmentalists appeared to align with and promote democratic ideals. That was then. Today, even as cloud computing and digital transformation agendas have become mainstream, it is clear the threat of digital fragmentation must be actively addressed. As different rules around privacy, cybersecurity and digital sovereignty emerge to thwart interoperability, fragmentation is impacting both governance and infrastructure. Digital borders in China, cross-border data restrictions in Europe and America’s disavowal of Chinese telecom equipment make for increasing disconnection.
The articles in this EAFQ examine where commonalities are possible in the digital economy, and where we may expect more clashes than cross-cutting frameworks.
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Australian Economic History »
Transformations of an Interdisciplinary Field
Authored by: Claire E. F. Wright
Publication date: June 2022
In a time of pandemics, war and climate change, fostering knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries is more important than ever. Economic history is one of the world’s oldest interdisciplinary fields, with its prosperity dependent on connection and relevance to disciplinary behemoths economics and history. Australian Economic History is the first history of an interdisciplinary field in Australia, and the first to set the field’s progress within the structures of Australian universities. It highlights the lived experience of doing interdisciplinary research, and how scholars have navigated the opportunities and challenges of this form of knowledge. These lessons are vital for those seeking to develop robust interdisciplinary conversations now and in the future.
‘This previously untold story of economic history in Australia exposes the centrality of economic thought and scholarship to Australian intellectual and political life. Deftly positioning economic history in an innovative institutional, place-based and person-focused narrative, Claire Wright entangles economics with the history of education to produce a tale of university interdisciplinarity, influence and impact. Written with vitality and bursting with both data and anecdote, this book makes an exceptional contribution to the intersecting fields of history, economics and higher education studies.’
– Hannah Forsyth, author of A History of the Modern Australian University.
‘Few readers would expect to find a classical tragedy in the story of an academic field. Yet that is what Claire Wright shows us in this study of Economic History, as it has been practiced in Australia. She traces the field from legendary beginnings to triumphant growth to organisational collapse - and renaissance on other terms. Carefully researched and vigorously written, this book raises questions about disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, universities and markets, and social bases of intellectual work, that are relevant to all fields today.’
– Raewyn Connell, author of The Good University
‘Australia proved a pioneer in the study of economic history, nurturing a discipline with innovative data and understanding of material trends. Yet by the 1990s economic history departments closed as senior scholars retired and the field was subsumed by conventional economics. In this absorbing study, Dr Claire Wright challenges the conventional account. She is tough-minded about financial and institutional pressures on the field, but cautiously optimistic about the future. It is a mistake, she argues, to see institutional representation as the benchmark of influence. Instead, the interdisciplinary nature of economic history has encouraged new research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences. With close attention to individual scholars and their university departments, and a deep sense of the trajectory of the field, Australian Economic History: Transformations of an Interdisciplinary Field is an original and important contribution to Australian intellectual history.’
– Glyn Davis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 14, Number 1, 2022 »
Publication date: March 2022
Economic cooperation in East Asia has progressed in its own distinct way, and the conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in 2019 is a huge achievement of strategic significance that pushes back against threats to the multilateral system. RCEP is the world’s largest regional pact in terms of GDP, trade volume, foreign direct investment and population. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly looks at RCEP going forward, the ways Asia’s largest economies are embracing the deal, the supply chain and manufacturing trends that are emerging and the RCEP framework for dealing with issues beyond those already negotiated.
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