In The News

China May Widen Yuan Trading Band Next Year, Report Says

September 25, 2003
Economists speculate that China will revalue the yuan by the time the Olympic torch is lit for the 2008 games. Under growing pressure from US business interests and other trade partners, China is likely to revalue its currency by making significant changes next year and possibly even floating the currency as early as 2008. "China wants to be a respectable global player," one senior...

No Good Reason to Dance

Ernesto Zedillo September 22, 2003
In the latest round of WTO talks, the chasm between 'developed' and 'developing' nations over agricultural subsidies proved too large to cross in only one week. The Cancun meeting has thus been largely declared a failure. Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and former president of Mexico, says that this difficulty should be taken as a...

China Joins the Global Economy - Part One

David Zweig September 15, 2003
Just over two decades ago, China was a vast, poor country whose centrally-planned economy offered its citizenry little hope for an improved standard of living. After a series of market-oriented reforms, however, many Chinese now regularly enjoy luxuries that were once reserved for the elite. In part one of a 2-part series on China's entry into the world economy, China expert David Zweig...

Two Years on, ASEAN Breaks Terrorism’s Deadly Lock

Daljit Singh September 11, 2003
In the two years since the September 11 attacks on the US, Southeast Asian nations have taken significant steps to eliminate terrorism, despite the serious obstacles that they must contend with. Many governments have struggled to crack down on terrorism and maintain relations with Muslim groups. For example, Thailand and Indonesia have made some headway with the recent arrests of Al-Qaeda and...

Protests Greet Yet Another WTO Meeting

Pranab Bardhan September 8, 2003
As the World Trade Organization prepares to meet in Cancun, Mexico, backers and detractors of globalization are clashing again, with each side claiming to represent the interests of the world's poor. Those opposed to globalization in its current form point to an increase in inequality and poverty in countries that have opened up to international capital and corporations, while supporters...

How Washington Can be a Hyper-Power and a Hyper-Borrower

Philip Segal September 2, 2003
What kind of a superpower gets into so much debt that it has trouble pushing around countries that it would love to? The American kind, says Philip Segal, Markets and Finance Editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal. China and Japan - two major buyers of US government bonds - could do great damage to the American economy if they decided to stop buying or to suddenly sell their share of the US...

Is America's Economy Really Too Big to Go Down the Drain?

Stephen King September 1, 2003
To most people, the prospect of an American collapse is almost unimaginable. But to Stephen King, managing director of economics at HSBC, it is a very real possibility. In this article, King traces the economic success of the US in the 90s, arguing that this growth was due in large part to other countries which were willing to prop up the US economy. America frequently spent more than it...