Posts Tagged ‘China’
Pulses: Singapore and the next ten/twenty years
I put up Pulses article on the futuresgroup wordpress blog here. Some takeaways are …
Competition from other ports rising on intra-Asia trade – 8 of top 10 container ports inAsia. E.g Guangzhou and Shenzhen overtaking HK. Shift in trade patterns with sharp-rise in intra-Asian trade. This should benefit SGP due to strong feeder network, but due to low demand and oversupply of port facilities, this will lead to cost competition/price war which SGP would come out poorly.
New ports from new trade patterns – India and ME trade patterns rising, Sri Lanka’s Colombo port is a more natural transshipment hub than SGP. Increased China-US could see more mainline services going directly on transpacific trade, reducing transshipment through SGP.
Too much trade volume – Rising intra-Asia trade may be so high that container lines choose to serve ports with mainline services going directly from point to point in Asia, rather than through feeders as now. Long running hub-spoke vs distributed angst here. But add in China Shipping Lines hmmm…
Help regional neighbors to improve – this boosts volumes which in turn could feed into SGP. PSA has done this with terminals in Kolakata etc in India, Tianjin etc in China. But this is different from regional challengers BKK (air logistics), HK/Southern China (China hub). Recently Fedex has moved its hub from Subic in Philippines to Guangzhou, DHL is entrenched in HK. How do you balance the rise of challengers in giant markets China, Indochina with the stability/security etc SGP offers?
BRIC-à-Brac
Institutional arrangements are responsible for the policy agenda that gets shoved through the policy window, and so too will they play a critical role in shaping the future geography of trade. The threads of vested interests woven into the fabric of international trade will determine both its strength/ fragility and design (perhaps wharped by protectionist or mercantilist tendencies or influenced/ forced into harmony by the weaver (and who would that be?)). BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is the latest institutional formation to join the family of the G(roup)s and how their influence will play out in the international arena depends much on their ability to compensate for one another’s deficiencies and compromise on their private agendas.
Goldman Sachs’ take on BRIC (can’t possibly leave out Jim O’Neill in this blog): http://www2.goldmansachs.com/ideas/brics/index.html
On BRIC’s incompatibility: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=5011 , http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSLE11928120090614?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
On BRIC’s multipolar world order: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6514737.ece
On BRIC’s unease with the dollar: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8101154.stm
On India’s capitalists: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2008/09/080905_desert_capitalists_one.shtml
On China in Africa: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/LSEMagazine/pdf/Summer%202009/RaisingTheRedLantern.pdf
SPO’s Ethos Perspectives Article on Possible Discontinuities in the Post-Crisis World
Hi all,
SPO just published an article (see link below) about possible discontinuities (and implications for Singapore) under the auspices of Ethos Perspectives.
There’s stuff ranging from a shift away from US-China driven growth, a new international financial architecture, the rise of state capitalism as the new dominant economic paradigm and the move from US unilateralism to global multilateralism.
Comments, however brutal, so long as they are honest, are most welcomed.
Two Articles on China Stirring its Economy
Two articles on China – The first centres around China’s apparent protectionism, while the second talks about China’s strategy of regional integration as the new engine of growth.
Just a quick note that the term “protectionist” is taken by different people to mean very different things – i.e. when denying accusations of ‘protectionism’, the Chinese mean to say that they are not creating any unfair advantage for its domestic exporters, merely developing its domestic industries. That’s quite different from popular interpretations that may say that the Chinese consciously implement or endorse protectionist measures.
And when people accuse the Chinese of being protectionist, most of the time, they are really saying that the Chinese is not doing anything to correct the imbalances in the global economy. Every economy is protectionist to some extent, even the US. So, you would expect parties who are really concerned about the correction of these imbalances like the US to be most vocal about China being protectionist.
Let’s start posting and sharing
Hi everyone, it was nice meeting up today and let’s just kickstart it with posting and sharing articles, videos etc related to future of trade. I love Zhi Jia saying “It must make us uncomfortable!” and that’s the spirit of enquiry that’s very beneficial in pushing the boundaries beyond the known unknowns to the unknown unknowns for this topic. Gambatte! 
There is a tag cloud that appears on the right. I’m tentatively just adding some starting tags, you can choose to use them to tag your post or just add your own if you find tags that are missing, or better. You can add as many tags for each post as you like.
When you are posting and you want to add a link to another article, just highlight and click on the ‘link’ icon. If you like to upload pictures/videos etc, just click on the icons next to the upload/insert above the ruler. These last two will make more sense when you start posting.
Happy posting!
