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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s announcement on March 15 that Japan will seek membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) brings the negotiations a step closer to a large, 12-member trade agreement connecting countries that account for 38 percent of world GDP. To be sure, much work lies ahead before Japan fully participates: bilateral discussions with TPP [...]
On Thursday March 7, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 2094, imposing a new round of sanctions against North Korea in response to its underground nuclear test last month. The penalties include some measures we have seen in the past–such as designating individuals and companies–but also some new curbs on North Korean trade and [...]
While in Korea and Japan several weeks ago, sparks flared not only over the Senkakus/Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands and Dokdo/Takeshima but the highly emotional issue of comfort women. As a result, we are about to have one of those quasi-natural experiments that social scientists love. Will history and politics trump economics? Or will growing interdependence pull the [...]
Note: This is an excerpt of the forthcoming PIIE Policy Brief Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership by Jeffrey J. Schott, Barbara Kotschwar, and Julia Muir. The text of this post was also the basis for the author’s remarks at The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Future of International Trade event (the webcast of which can be found [...]
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) collects and publishes quarterly data on the currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves, known as COFER. The data are published for three groups: the world, the advanced economies, and the emerging and developing economies. For each group, allocated reserves are broken down into the traditional reserve currencies (US dollar, [...]
On the face of it, the financial crisis of 2007-08 has helped rebalance the governance of global financial authorities, partially correcting the prior underrepresentation of emerging economies and of Asia in particular. From November 2008 to April 2009, when the G-7/G-8 was superseded by the G-20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was empowered and enlarged [...]
North Korea executed its highly anticipated missile launch and with its failure managed to achieve the second worst outcome imaginable. (The worst would have been hitting China.) The North Koreans have managed in a single stroke to not only defy the UN Security Council, the United States, and even their patron China, but also demonstrate [...]
Setting aside Syria, South Korea may be the only country in the world with politics more polarized than the United States. While in Seoul last week I was reminded of this when the leaders of the political opposition attempted to march on the US embassy to deliver letters addressed to President Obama and Vice President [...]
The mid-November meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum produced some welcome news for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a potential agreement that could clear the way for more trade and investment across the Pacific. Most important, three countries—Canada, Japan, and Mexico—announced that they would explore the possibility of joining the negotiations, which already [...]
Why has China moved to raise interest rates? And is there any connection between its monetary policy actions, which surprised global markets, and whether China is willing to let its currency appreciate? Was this an either/or choice? The answers to these questions are not simple, but first one needs to look at the record of [...]