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32. China’s Dilemmas in Bailing Out Debt-Ridden Sri Lanka
- Author:
- Ganeshan Wignaraja
- Publication Date:
- 01-2022
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- East-West Center
- Abstract:
- Ganeshan Wignaraja, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) of the National University of Singapore and a Senior Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London, explains that "Sri Lanka is now stuck in a ‘debt trap’. However, the debt trap is not wholly Chinese."
- Topic:
- Debt, Development, Diplomacy, and Economics
- Political Geography:
- China, Asia, and Sri Lanka
33. China’s increased presence in Latin America: Win-win relations or a new dependency? A state of the art
- Author:
- Daniel Agramont Lechín
- Publication Date:
- 01-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Postgraduate Program on Sustainable Development and Social Inequalities in the Andean Region (trAndeS)
- Abstract:
- The rise of the Popular Republic of China (PRC) is one of the most significant events in contemporary international relations. However, at the global level, the “reemergence of China as a major global power has led to a considerable debate over the likely consequences for the rest of the world” (Jenkins, 2010: 810). China’s growing power raises questions as to the meaning of its superpower status as a nation, and the impact of its newfound influence in not only the Asia-Pacific region, but also the Global South (Dessein, 2015). In the specific case of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the debate centers on the potential disadvantages that China’s vast supply of financial resources might bring for the region. Accordingly, the current paper is intended to examine the debate that has arisen in recent literature around the impact of China’s increased economic presence on Latin America –with win-win relations on the one hand and new dependency on the other.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Economics, Investment, and Dependency
- Political Geography:
- China, Asia, and Latin America
34. Assessing the Effects of Trade Liberalization With Third Countries: The Case of the Eurasian Economic Union
- Author:
- Simon Sngryan
- Publication Date:
- 06-2022
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of Liberty and International Affairs
- Institution:
- Institute for Research and European Studies (IRES)
- Abstract:
- The processes of objectively conditioned integration in the economic, political, legal, and institutional spheres of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) Member States took place step by step, starting from preferential trade agreements, passing to the customs union, the common market and other stages of integration. This process is accompanied by the gradual deepening of trade liberalization with potential partners. The selection of potential partners should be carried out through a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the structure and volumes of foreign trade of the EEU Member States (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia) with third parties, their markets structure, existing customs regulation, trade barriers, and possible export potential. The research evaluated the EEU's possible enlargement effects on the Member States' economic indicators. The research aimed to assess the possible consequences of EEU expansion and signing free trade agreements, considering Pakistan, Korea, and Malaysia as potential trade partners. Modeling the effect of an FTA assumes horizontal zeroing of tariffs between partners. Then, using the GTAP model, a new state of general equilibrium was calculated corresponding to the changed parameters of customs and tariff regulation. In this case, most variables, such as change in GDP, production output, and export-import volumes, were estimated, manifesting the economic effect of trade liberalization.
- Topic:
- Economics, International Trade and Finance, Regional Cooperation, and Trade Liberalization
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Eurasia, and Asia
35. Place-based policies and agglomeration economies: Firm-level evidence from Special Economic Zones in India
- Author:
- Holger Görg and Alina Mulyukova
- Publication Date:
- 03-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW)
- Abstract:
- This paper exploits time and geographic variation in the adoption of Special Economic Zones in India to assess the direct and spillover effects of the program. We combine geocoded firm-level data and geocoded SEZs using a concentric ring approach, thus creating a novel dataset of firms with their assigned SEZ status. To overcome the selection bias we employ inverse probability weighting with time-varying covariates in a difference-in-differences framework. Our analysis yields that conditional on controlling for initial selection, SEZs induced no further productivity gains for within SEZ firms, on average. This effect is predominantly driven by relatively less productive firms, whereas more productive firms experienced significant productivity gains. However, SEZs created negative externalities for firms in the vicinity which attenuate with distance. Neighbouring domestic firms, large firms, manufacturing firms and non-importer firms are the main losers of the program. Evidence points at the diversion of inputs from non-SEZ to SEZ-firms as a potential mechanism.
- Topic:
- Economics, Business, Special Economic Zones, and Geography
- Political Geography:
- India and Asia
36. Who Lends to Africa and How? Introducing the Africa Debt Database
- Author:
- David Mihalyi and Christoph Trebesch
- Publication Date:
- 03-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW)
- Abstract:
- Africa’s sovereign debt markets are not well understood, partly due to a lack of data. This paper introduces the Africa Debt Database (ADD), the most granular and comprehensive dataset on external borrowing by African governments thus far. Our project moves beyond existing aggregate datasets and instead releases information on individual loans and bonds, in particular on the financial terms of each instrument. Taken together, we cover nearly 7000 loans and bonds between 2000 and 2020, with a total volume of 644 billion USD. Using this data, we study Africa’s record lending boom of the 2010s in detail. The debt boom was mainly driven by large sovereign bond issuances in London and New York, as well as growing lending by Chinese state-owned banks. The micro data also reveal a large variation in lending terms across countries, time, and creditors. Sovereign external bonds have interest rates of 6 percent, on average, Chinese banks charge 2-4 percent, and multilateral organizations just 1 percent. Strikingly, many governments in Africa simultaneously borrow large amounts from both private and official creditors, at vastly different rates. The large differences in debt servicing costs are indicative of a cross-creditor subsidy, as cheap concessional loans can be used to pay the high interest to private or Chinese creditors.
- Topic:
- Economics, Foreign Aid, Credit, and Influence
- Political Geography:
- Africa, China, and Asia
37. Crisis in Kazakhstan: Protests, Regime Stability, and Regional Security
- Publication Date:
- 01-2022
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- The Harriman Institute
- Abstract:
- How did the protests erupt and how will recent events influence government policy? Who is in charge? Will Kazakhstan’s foreign policy orientation change? And what is the significance of the CSTO’s intervention? Our expert panelists will address these and other questions, as well as ponder what the future holds for the country widely considered as Central Asia’s economic engine.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Economics, Governance, and Protests
- Political Geography:
- Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and Asia
38. How Central Asia Became Part of the Developing World
- Publication Date:
- 04-2022
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- The Harriman Institute
- Abstract:
- During the Soviet period, official narratives presented Central Asia as a former colony that had been integrated on equal terms into the USSR while overcoming economic backwardness. This ambiguity was useful for Moscow’s Cold War politics and also shaped how Central Asian actors maneuvered within the Soviet system. In the late Soviet period, this ambiguity was largely abandoned. Some Central Asians began to insist on the region’s colonial status, while economists and sociologists in Moscow argued that Soviet development efforts had failed and that the region was culturally too different to fit into socialist economic schemes. In this talk, Kalinovsky will trace how different groups within the USSR can the late Soviet period came to reimagine Central Asia as a part of the Third World, discarding the ambiguity of earlier decades. These views also had profound implications for the region’s post-independence transformation: Western development professionals who came to Central Asia after 1991 found the region much more developed than other places they had worked. That also changed over the course of the 1990s, in part because of the continuing influence of Russian scholars, and in part as a result of the development community's evolving understanding of regional challenges (informed, to a large extent, by local scholars), a change that was solidified with the post 9-11 turn to the Global War on Terror. Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, Capitalism, and Decolonization
- Political Geography:
- Central Asia and Asia
39. Beijing Winter Olympics 2022: Sports, Law, and Policies
- Author:
- Tim Harcourt, Deborah Healey, Keiji Kawai, and Yang Pei
- Publication Date:
- 02-2022
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- China Studies Centre, The University of Sydney
- Abstract:
- The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics were hosted amid the Covid-19 pandemic and surrounded by concerns and controversies. This Understanding China Brief results from a roundtable discussion organized by the China Studies Centre and the Centre for Asia and Pacific Law of Sydney University on 3 February 2022 to examine four aspects of the Beijing Olympics: boycotts, COVID- 19 control, law reform, and the economics of the Olympics.
- Topic:
- Economics, Reform, Sports, Conflict, Olympics, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
40. Red Ink: Estimating Chinese Industrial Policy Spending in Comparative Perspective
- Author:
- Gerard Dipippo, Ilaria Mazzocco, and Scott Kennedy
- Publication Date:
- 05-2022
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Center for Strategic and International Studies
- Abstract:
- A new report by the CSIS Economics Program and the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics quantifies the size of total industrial policy spending by China and compares it to seven other major economies: Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Much of the existing research on industrial policy focuses on its effects, but there are few, if any, published studies that attempt a systematic comparison and quantification of overall industrial policy spending. The heart of the report is the careful calculation of total industrial policy spending by China and the other economies, combining estimates from multiple tools, among them direct subsidies, tax breaks, below-market credit, and state investment funds. The report provides additional context by examining the historical trajectory of industrial policy of these economies and the evolution of industrial policy across these economies for three industries—aluminum, semiconductors, and electric vehicles. The historical and sectoral analyses point to some similarities across economies, but they also demonstrate how distinctive China has been in terms of both quantifiable spending and non-quantifiable policy tools. Finally, this report discusses several important policy implications, including greater transparency and more harmonized reporting about industrial policy spending and the potential ways in which policymakers could employ these data to more effectively limit industrial policy spending by China and other economies.
- Topic:
- Economics, Industrial Policy, Industry, and Labor Market
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia