Asia’s businesses and households rely on a global system of rules and institutions to do business overseas. That global system is under attack, and Asian governments are yet to mobilise to stop it.

For the best part of a century, the world trade has grown exponentially on the back of rule-based multilateral trading system. The year of 2025 witnessed the 30th anniversary of the World Trade ...

Trade has long proven to be an engine for growth and development, and in recent decades the countries of East Asia and the Pacific have been major beneficiaries of this phenomenon. However, many are ...

The Turnberry System is a way to replace the WTO-based postwar multilateral trading system with bilateral agreements. It marks a significant turning point in global trade rules and will profoundly ...

Urbanisation is one of the most consequential and dynamic forces of the twenty-first century. More than half of humanity already lives in cities; city-dwellers will account for two-thirds of the world ...

Free trade seems to have few supporters these days. Though actual trade volumes are recovering from the post-crisis recession and drop in commodity prices, “globalization” has become increasingly ...

The “global spoils system,” or the way in which top posts at multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), regional development banks, and UN agencies are ...

After a recent trip to India, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell blogged that while he understood “in a multipolar world everyone wants to express his or her own truth,” this needs to be ...

A special meeting on how best to strengthen the world’s multilateral system to better promote sustainable development kicked off at UN Headquarters in New York yesterday with a call for new thinking ...

On Jan. 7, Indonesia officially became a full member of BRICS. With the addition of the world’s fourth-most-populous country and eighth-largest economy by purchasing power, the bloc now encompasses ...

President Trump’s recent actions on trade, particularly the imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, and the announcement of a deadline for imposing the ...