Asean
Lack of transparency fuels public unrest in Hong Kong
Author: Joseph Cheng, City University of Hong Kong
Around 120,000 people recently took to the streets to protest against the government’s decision not to grant a free-to-air licence to Hong Kong Television Network (HKTV). The decision sparked public outrage because it was seen to be unfair and contrary to the fair market principles at the very heart of Hong Kong’s economic success. The failure to disclose the reasons for its decision also revealed the government’s lack of transparency in the decision-making process.
The general public believe that program quality is deteriorating due to the lack of competition between the two existing free-to-air television stations, Television Broadcasts Limited and AsiaTV. This is especially so because AsiaTV is often at the point of bankruptcy — it filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and has repeatedly reported financial difficulties. Naturally, the public hoped that an increase in competition through new licences would increase the quality of television programs and provide the community with more options. Television remains the most important source of entertainment for ordinary people in Hong Kong.
The people of Hong Kong were surprised by the news of the denial of a licence to HKTV, which had been the most aggressive in its preparations leading up to the decision. Many have claimed that the government’s decision was based on its intention to save AsiaTV because it was not expected to survive in a more competitive market. AsiaTV has certainly been the most pro-Beijing and its owners have excellent connections in Beijing.
HKTV, on the other hand, is perceived to be politically unreliable. Its founder and chairman, Ricky Wong Wai-kay, does not have any substantial investments in China, where as the two new networks that were granted licences, PCCW and i-Cable, do. PCCW and i-Cable are also major business players in the territory.
The public believe that the CY Leung administration was too eager to please the Chinese authorities at the expense of the ordinary people’s interests. The decision also violated the basic principle at the very foundation of the territory’s economic success: fair competition.
Around 120,000 people took part in a protest rally organised by the HKTV staff who had lost their jobs following the government’s decision. Facing the public’s outrage, several members of the Executive Council (the cabinet of the Chief Executive) attempted to distance themselves from the Chief Executive, implying that he alone was responsible for the decision. This discredited Leung as he was seen to be losing control of his own team — as well as the Executive Council itself, which is supposed to be founded on the principle of collective responsibility.
The protesters then turned their attention to the Legislative Council, demanding — unsuccessfully — the documents related to the decision be publicly released. While a clear majority of the people would have demanded the legislators to support the motion, the functional-constituency legislators largely ignored the community’s appeal. Worse still, Beijing’s organ in Hong Kong, the Central Liaison Office, had been actively engaged in lobbying the pro-establishment legislators.
The Legislative Council’s decision also exposes the inadequacy of democracy in the electoral system, as only 40 of the 70 legislators are returned by universal suffrage. Those from very narrowly based functional constituencies are easily influenced by the lobbying of Beijing, which has been less and less restrained from interventions in Hong Kong.
The HKTV controversy reveals the people’s strong dissatisfaction with the CY Leung administration, which is leading the territory toward a potential crisis. The Chinese authorities have also informed the public that they had not taken a position on the issue, implying that Leung has to assume responsibility himself.
The most important lesson to take away from this is that without democracy, people’s basic interests and core values might be threatened. These sentiments may well enhance the support for democratisation in the present political reform struggles.
Joseph Cheng is Professor of Political Science at the City University of Hong Kong.
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Lack of transparency fuels public unrest in Hong Kong
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…)
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