Asia & the Pacific

This policy brief describes the persistent challenge of poor electricity reliability in India and how it interacts with key regulatory policies, analyzes Delhi’s experience with outage compensation since 2017, and highlights areas for additional economic and policy research on this topic.

The panel considers how the US, UK and EU can contribute to a global response. It also asks what a global response to the health and economic crisis in the developing world would look like.

As the world's two largest economies, the United States and China are condemned to a relationship that must combine competition and cooperation. For the United States, exceptionalism now includes working with the Chinese to help produce global public goods, while also defending values such as human rights.

Kaveri Iychettira and Afreen Siddiqi explain why computational modelling is a useful tool, especially when stakes are high and resources are constrained, and detail why developing countries should build capacity for it. 

"The recent turns of events in the United States, in cities across our great country, have caused within me feelings of dismay and disappointment," writes Gen. (ret.) Vincent K. Brooks.

"As an African American man, the feelings of inadequate and unfulfilled justice that I have felt for too many years of my life come again to the fore. And, as a retired career military officer from the family of a retired career military officer, I see again the threat of the use of the active duty military force on the streets of America, and I see the manipulation of the image of the military by our President. Dismay and disappointment."

This paper responds to a topic from the Army War College’s Key Strategic Issues List, 2018-2020: Evaluate the ramifications of China’s and/or Russia’s interests in Africa for U.S. land forces and suggest options, both to compete and to cooperate, to further U.S. interests.

While U.S. land forces may benefit from competition or cooperation with Chinese elements in Africa, I judge that they possess limited agency to compete or cooperate in the context of these definitions. Therefore, I will take a whole-of-government approach to furthering U.S. interests in Africa vis-à-vis China.

As tensions between the U.S. and China continue to escalate, Harvard University political science professor Graham Allison on Saturday (May 30) warned that Taiwan's tireless pursuit of its independence may result in Beijing's military retaliation.

The World Bank on May 19, as it does every six years, released the results of the most recent International Comparison Program (ICP), which measures price levels and GDPs across 176 countries.  The new results are striking.  It is surprising that they have received almost no attention so far, perhaps overshadowed by all things coronavirus.

For the first time, the ICP shows China’s total real income as slightly larger than the US.  It reports that China’s GDP was $19,617 billion in 2017, in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, while the United States’ GDP stood at $19,519 billion.

Juergen Braunstein and Sachin Silva argue that sovereign wealth funds may be central to governments' efforts to balance public responsibility with private interests in post-pandemic economies.

Grand strategy is hailed by some as a silver bullet for resolving policy drift, while others reject it as a hubristic term. The author argues that expectations of this concept need to be revised. The first half of this article addresses the study of grand strategy. The author identifies and critiques the prominent conceptual frameworks for evaluating grand strategy. He offers an alternative approach for measuring the quality of a state's grand strategy, based on the notion of proportionality. The second half is tailored towards policymakers, as the article assesses the ways in which grand-strategic thinking can be improved in government.