Last week, Japanese steel giant Nippon Steel announced it would be buying a pair of Thai steel companies for a combined $783 million. As reported by Reuters, the combined annual output of the two Thai steelmakers is 3 million tons, which will bring N..
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The French energy giant TotalEnergies has signaled its support for targeted sanctions on Myanmar’s oil and gas industry, the largest single source of income for the country’s military administration. In a letter to Human Rights Watch (HRW) that was m..
Read More »More than a half million people in Afghanistan have lost their jobs since the Taliban takeover in mid-August, the International Labor Organization said in a report released Wednesday. The ILO said the crisis has paralyzed the economy and slammed the ..
Read More »PT Kereta Api Indonesia (Indonesian Railways Company, or KAI) is the country’s state-owned rail operator and they have been, if you will excuse the pun, on something of a roll lately. Like any company in the travel industry, KAI has been battered by ..
Read More »Yesterday, The Irrawaddy magazine published a short article detailing a sudden boom in the smuggling of areca nut from Myanmar into India. According to the report, the illicit trade in the stimulant, which is often known as betel nut, is currently su..
Read More »American companies continue to import teakwood from military-ruled Myanmar in apparent violation of U.S. sanctions, an advocacy group said in a report released yesterday. Justice for Myanmar (JFM), a Myanmar-based human rights group, found that U.S. ..
Read More »In November, a group of ASEAN sectoral bodies known as the ASEAN Taxonomy Board (ATB) released its first version of the ASEAN Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance, an initial proposal for a sustainability classification system intended to apply across th..
Read More »China’s economy has faced major disruptions through 2021 due to the ongoing China-U.S. trade war, COVID-19 restrictions, and power shortages. While the economy may continue to suffer from the ongoing trade war and possible COVID-19 resurgences, new i..
Read More »In my favorite dialogue from George R.R. Martin’s saga, A Song of Ice and Fire, two characters known for their cunning, Varys and Tyrion, consider the nature of power. They do so through a riddle: If a king, a priest and a wealthy man sit in a room w..
Read More »Podcast hosts Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) and Katie Putz (@LadyPutz) discuss the most significant geopolitical developments in Asia in 2021. Click the play button to the right to listen. If you’re an iOS or Mac user, you can also subscribe to The Diplomat’..
Read More »In September the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a three-year plan to regulate predictive algorithms, and Chinese companies scrambled to comply with new regulations. News of the plan came on the heels of two other stringent policie..
Read More »Last month Japan’s new Prime Minister Kishida Fumio unveiled a record-breaking economic stimulus package to rebuild Japan’s COVID-19 battered economy. But shortly after, Japan once again closed its borders to new arrivals in response to the spread of..
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