Asia and the Global Economy最新文献

North Korea is a complex humanitarian emergency with food insecurity at its core. As of August 2022, both quantity and price data point to a deteriorating situation, made worse by the regime's self-isolating response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Food availability has likely fallen below minimum human needs, and on one metric is the worst since the 1990s famine. Food insecurity in North Korea is not only a humanitarian issue, but it is a strategic issue as well. In this context, the diplomatic leverage conferred by aid is unclear, nor is North Korea's priority as a recipient, in light of competing needs elsewhere. Resolution of North Korea's chronic food insecurity would require changes in the regime's domestic and foreign policy commitments, but this seems unlikely due to enablement by China and Russia.

North Korea is one of the most restrictive countries in terms of data accessibility, especially at the regional level. This research assesses the regional economy in North Korea using the nighttime light data. It estimates GRDP per capita at the county level in 2012–2020, the Kim Jong-Un era, and assesses the inequality of North Korean regions. The results reveal that cities such as Sinuiju have a comparable level of GRDP per capita with Pyongyang and that the spatial distribution of low-income counties changes from regions near South Korean borders to regions near Chinese borders as sanctions are implemented. Also, it appears that substantial county-level inequality exists. It calls for a need for the county-level economic research of North Korea despite the lack of regional data.

While the poverty reductions in the Philippines in 2012–2018 are modest compared to what Vietnam, China or Indonesia achieved, all trends indicated the country's continuing growth will be inclusive. This paper traces the evolution and decomposition of poverty and inequality in 2000–2018 using official national household surveys. We find the growth since 2012, unlike before, was consistently pro-poor. Moreover, growth and redistribution aligned after 2012 to reduce poverty, whereas often before 2015 they offset each other's effects. Inequality improved, as the proportions of households with both heads and their spouses employed or receiving domestic assistances have risen faster among the poor than among the non-poor. Finally, the overall trends in the quality of growth and its contribution and that of redistribution to poverty adjustments are reflected in most regions. The Philippine experience in 2000–2018 thus underscores that growth alone does not ensure poverty reductions, while growth with government-directed redistribution can.

China's rapidly growing role in the world economy has been accompanied by rising bilateral trade with Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN group) as well as expanded offshore renminbi (RMB) markets in the region. Using a Markov-switching analysis that allows for variation across stable and volatile domestic inflation regimes, we find evidence of significant inflation transmission from China to Australia and the five larger ASEAN economies. Chinese inflation effects are further confirmed when we incorporate money supply and commodity price effects within a Markov-switching Vector Autoregressive (MSVAR) framework. The importance of allowing for regime change over our sample period is clear and these inflation effects are shown to generally be stronger during periods when domestic inflation is more volatile. These findings on inflation pass-through from China represent a novel extension to a prior literature that has been primarily limited to real economy and trade effects.

The advent of the coronavirus in early 2020 led to the severe shutdown of economic activities across the globe. The virus led to a pandemic affecting the physical facilitation of cross border merchandise trade. International trade is augmented with trade documentation and physical verification. Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) as WTO plus agreements between countries have provided bilateral trade opportunities for participating countries. Due to the pandemic, several physical processes shifted to digital mode and people were forced to participate, giving a boost to the digital economy across the world. Developing and under-developed countries were left behind due to a lack of clarity on digital trade provisions in the present WTO framework. Though, RTAs provided much scope for interpreting the existing provisions with innovation for the current times. The present study explores the digital trade provisions in the RTAs and how the pandemic will further push inculcating provisions. The focus is on RTAs that exist in the Asia Pacific region, along with India's perspective. The study identifies the initial digital provisions and collaborations, and evaluates the scope of digital trade.

This paper examines two aspects of the digitalization of finance in India, which has been surprisingly robust and fast growing. Much of this success is due to the government's introduction of a biometric identity known as Aadhaar. Because financial transactions require definitive proof of identity of the transacting parties, Aadhaar provides this proof without any document via biometric verification, thus greatly facilitating electronic transactions. The paper also documents the impact of digital financialization by showing examples of entrepreneurship, both directly in the fintech space through the creation of new web-based services as well as the rise of new businesses that make use of the fintech infrastructure that has been created.

This study examines the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economic integration of the ASEAN-6 region. The study finds that the coronavirus pandemic's impact can be easily traced using stringency, bilateral exports, and tourist arrivals, indicating a significant implication for the economic integration process. The firm-level analysis suggests that though the coronavirus outbreak's impact has caused uniformly to firms, the effect varies across ASEAN-6 nations. The pandemic strongly impacts large firms.

This paper argues that Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, faces a dilemma between maintaining his dictatorship and enabling economic growth amid pervasive marketization. Although he puts more emphasis on economic development than his father did, he is unlikely to launch Chinese-style reform mainly because North Korea is different from China in terms of the political conditions, which determine the intensity of economic reforms. To do so, the paper reviews the literature on the impact of marketization on social norms, the official economy, and corruption in North Korea. On the basis of these impacts, it posits that facilitating marketization from below contributes to North Korea's move toward a market economy.

This study analyses the lack of robust conclusions about the association between inequality and economic growth. On the basis of ex-ante concept of inequality of opportunity, the parametric measure of unequal opportunity is used by partitioning the total sample in to 16 mutually exclusive circumstance groups. Theil's T index of monthly per capita consumption expenditure in household survey conducted by the NSSO in different rounds since the early 1980s is used to measure overall inequality and unequal opportunity. The relative index of inequality of opportunity is used as explanatory variable in the growth regression equation. To find out the direction of causality, we also estimate inequality equation by taking growth as an explanatory variable in presence of some control variables. Empirical findings of this study suggest that overall inequality and inequality of opportunity have negative effects on subsequent growth, while initial growth has no significant effect overall inequality and has a significant positive effect on inequality of opportunity.

Cashless payment has rapidly developed in emerging markets following the digitization of finance. In this paper, by calculating the ratio of cashless payment in Russia, we find that it takes the shape of J-curve exponential growth, unlike in other developed and emerging economies. Although debit cards significantly dominate other types of cashless payment, the development of e-money is also significant. Internal and external factors both account for the J-curve exponential growth in cashless payment, and the external factors have a larger impact. We distinguish the peculiar features in the promotion of cashless payment that are peculiar to Russia and highlight the fact that Russia's national payment system was formed to address rising national security and geopolitical risks. Cashless payment is centralized and administered by the Bank of Russia, in order to digitize the financial sector and the government, with the goal of driving the digital economy.