Asean
Australia and the Pacific islands: a loss of focus or a loss of direction?
Author: Sandra Tarte, USP Recent claims in the media that Australia’s foreign minister has ‘ignored’, ‘neglected’ and ‘taken his eyes off’ the Pacific islands have underscored a number of policy dilemmas facing Australian diplomacy in the region. These have been evident for some time and centre primarily around the approach to Fiji’s post-coup government , led by Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama. Like other western democracies, Australia imposed diplomatic, military and political sanctions on the military-led government after the December 2006 coup. Australia also sought to utilise the Pacific Islands Forum to coordinate a regional approach to Fiji – initially based on engagement and dialogue to encourage an early return to elected government. When this approach failed, the Forum adopted more punitive measures, including suspending Fiji’s Forum membership in May 2009 and excluding it from aid programs provided through the Forum. The dilemmas facing Australian diplomacy and foreign policy in the region include the obvious ones that have been highlighted in the media debate. Most prominent is the fact that Australia’s efforts to isolate the Fiji government have encouraged Fiji to actively seek new partnerships , including most notably with China. This has led to the growing influence of China, and what seems to be a commensurate loss of influence by Australia. Another obvious dilemma is that Fiji’s suspension from the Forum has only served to undermine what was once the region’s premier regional organisation and shifted the political focus to other regional and international groupings. Fiji has made it clear it does not seek an early return to the Forum’s fold but is cultivating new alignments – the Melanesian Spearhead Group, the Pacific Small Islands Developing States group, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Association of South East Asian Nations (where it has sought observer status). There are other policy dilemmas for Australia, which have perhaps been less obvious. The suspension of Fiji from regional policy mechanisms – including security dialogues, intelligence sharing, and maritime surveillance – has not only weakened Fiji’s capacity to manage its external security environment, but created additional security problems for the region, including for Australia and New Zealand. Intelligence and capability gaps in Fiji’s security apparatus have been created since the coup that cannot necessarily be filled by China, Indonesia or other new partners. This problem – which is also a regional problem – has been compounded by the loss of experienced military officers from the senior ranks of Fiji’s Military Forces, since the December 2006 coup. This has created what some have called a leadership vacuum in the armed forces and is due in large part to the exodus of senior professional officers into civil service positions in the Fiji government. Junior officers filling these vacated positions in the military no longer have the benefit of staff college training in Australia or other western countries, due to military bans. As Australian policymakers no doubt grapple with these dilemmas there is inevitably a need to come to terms with a new regional ‘ball-game’. Shifting international alignments and patterns of influence perhaps mean that the ‘old regional order’ – led by Australia and New Zealand – will no longer be tenable. There are new dynamics in train, which may mean more economic opportunities and more political options for some (though not all) Pacific island states. This is not necessarily a bad thing for either Australia or the region. There is now more talk – if not action – in favor of South-South cooperation. Changing circumstances require a more flexible policy approach in order to harness the possible openings this more fluid landscape provides and adapt to new realities. For Australia this does not necessarily mean abandoning principles in its approach to Fiji, but of mapping a new direction. Fiji’s so-called ‘Look North Policy’ has never purported to be a substitute for traditional partnerships, such as with Australia and New Zealand. Thus the door to dialogue and engagement has never been entirely shut. The challenge, however, is to ensure that both Australia and Fiji recognise the need to keep this door open – especially in the lead-up to Fiji’s anticipated elections in 2014. Dr Sandra Tarte is Director, Politics and International Affairs Program at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. Preventing Fiji from becoming the pariah state of the Pacific Fiji’s search for new friends Japan’s aid to the South Pacific and the China factor
Author: Sandra Tarte, USP
Recent claims in the media that Australia’s foreign minister has ‘ignored’, ‘neglected’ and ‘taken his eyes off’ the Pacific islands have underscored a number of policy dilemmas facing Australian diplomacy in the region. These have been evident for some time and centre primarily around the approach to Fiji’s post-coup government, led by Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama.
Like other western democracies, Australia imposed diplomatic, military and political sanctions on the military-led government after the December 2006 coup. Australia also sought to utilise the Pacific Islands Forum to coordinate a regional approach to Fiji – initially based on engagement and dialogue to encourage an early return to elected government. When this approach failed, the Forum adopted more punitive measures, including suspending Fiji’s Forum membership in May 2009 and excluding it from aid programs provided through the Forum.
The dilemmas facing Australian diplomacy and foreign policy in the region include the obvious ones that have been highlighted in the media debate.
Most prominent is the fact that Australia’s efforts to isolate the Fiji government have encouraged Fiji to actively seek new partnerships, including most notably with China. This has led to the growing influence of China, and what seems to be a commensurate loss of influence by Australia. Another obvious dilemma is that Fiji’s suspension from the Forum has only served to undermine what was once the region’s premier regional organisation and shifted the political focus to other regional and international groupings. Fiji has made it clear it does not seek an early return to the Forum’s fold but is cultivating new alignments – the Melanesian Spearhead Group, the Pacific Small Islands Developing States group, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Association of South East Asian Nations (where it has sought observer status).
There are other policy dilemmas for Australia, which have perhaps been less obvious. The suspension of Fiji from regional policy mechanisms – including security dialogues, intelligence sharing, and maritime surveillance – has not only weakened Fiji’s capacity to manage its external security environment, but created additional security problems for the region, including for Australia and New Zealand.
Intelligence and capability gaps in Fiji’s security apparatus have been created since the coup that cannot necessarily be filled by China, Indonesia or other new partners.
This problem – which is also a regional problem – has been compounded by the loss of experienced military officers from the senior ranks of Fiji’s Military Forces, since the December 2006 coup. This has created what some have called a leadership vacuum in the armed forces and is due in large part to the exodus of senior professional officers into civil service positions in the Fiji government. Junior officers filling these vacated positions in the military no longer have the benefit of staff college training in Australia or other western countries, due to military bans.
As Australian policymakers no doubt grapple with these dilemmas there is inevitably a need to come to terms with a new regional ‘ball-game’. Shifting international alignments and patterns of influence perhaps mean that the ‘old regional order’ – led by Australia and New Zealand – will no longer be tenable. There are new dynamics in train, which may mean more economic opportunities and more political options for some (though not all) Pacific island states. This is not necessarily a bad thing for either Australia or the region. There is now more talk – if not action – in favor of South-South cooperation.
Changing circumstances require a more flexible policy approach in order to harness the possible openings this more fluid landscape provides and adapt to new realities. For Australia this does not necessarily mean abandoning principles in its approach to Fiji, but of mapping a new direction. Fiji’s so-called ‘Look North Policy’ has never purported to be a substitute for traditional partnerships, such as with Australia and New Zealand. Thus the door to dialogue and engagement has never been entirely shut. The challenge, however, is to ensure that both Australia and Fiji recognise the need to keep this door open – especially in the lead-up to Fiji’s anticipated elections in 2014.
Dr Sandra Tarte is Director, Politics and International Affairs Program at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji.
- Preventing Fiji from becoming the pariah state of the Pacific
- Fiji’s search for new friends
- Japan’s aid to the South Pacific and the China factor
See more here:
Australia and the Pacific islands: a loss of focus or a loss of direction?
Asean
ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon
Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University
The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.
Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.
Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.
Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.
A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.
Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.
Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.
ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.
In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.
This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.
What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.
It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.
Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…
Markets
Tiger Trade Launches SGX Trading, Meeting Demand from Asian Investors
Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).
SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
(more…)Asean
Can Asia maintain growth with an ever ageing population ?
To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.
Asia has been the world champion of economic growth for decades, and this year will be no exception. According to the latest International Monetary Fund Regional Economic Outlook(REO), the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP is projected to increase by 5.5% in 2017 and 5.4% in 2018. (more…)
- Q1 2024 Brief on Transfer Pricing in Asia
- New Report from Dezan Shira & Associates: China Takes the Lead in Emerging Asia Manufacturing Index 2024
- Is journalist Vicky Xu preparing to return to China?
- Guide for Foreign Residents: Obtaining a Certificate of No Criminal Record in China
- China Unveils Plan to Upgrade Industrial Equipment
- China deepens engagement with new Indonesian president as top diplomat visits Jakarta
