There have been calls in the US and Europe to reduce China s advantage in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. But China s supply-chain advantage in this area has become so important for the global EV industry that giving up that edge could put a country s development of its own EV sector at an obvious disadvantage.
There was some encouraging climate action in 2022, but the world remains far off track to meet the set goals of reducing global heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions and limiting future planetary warming to limit climate change. Environmentalists have called for a strong collective commitment and concerted efforts toward slashing emissions in 2023, if the world wants to keep climate extremes from becoming even more devastating.
There is a saying that nations are always better off when they choose to practice free trade, or buy and sell from one another freely. When a country opens up to unrestricted normal trade, capital and labor will shift, more efficiently and wisely too, toward those industries in which they are used.
There was a time when Asian economies made concerted efforts to promote regional financial cooperation in the wake of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, with the view of enhancing their ability to withstand outside financial risks. Now financial coordination is no longer the focus of regional economic development, but under the growing threat of the stronger US dollar, the intensifying wave of depreciation of Asian currencies seems to have offered a renewed opportunity for regional countries to once again facilitate financial cooperation.