Systemic risks of asean+3 financial integration: challenges, opportunities and the future

There has been rapid de facto trade integration in ASEAN+3 over the past decades, and experts have noted that this leads to greater de facto financial integration. These two therefore have reinforcing effects on each other. However, this cycle brings with it systemic financial risks that could lead to balance of payments crises, capital reversals, and exchange rate variability from current account imbalances which have caused global disruptions historically. The way to keep history from repeating itself is to address these risks. The Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) is one way of doing so, by providing an insurance mechanism that can safeguard the trigger points for said crises. However, the development of de jure integration policies such as this has been slow, much slower than policies that further trade integration, posing a systemic risk. This paper clarifies the implications of this; discusses the possible reasons for this discrepancy; and provides potential solutions that will enable ASEAN+3 to speed up the process of prudent financial integration.

Climate change and its impact on peace and security in Southeast Asia

Climate change is today one of the greatest risks to peace and security, but arguably remains at the margins of policy action amid the loss of trust in multilateral institutions. The impacts of climate change are already felt by local communities in regions on the frontline. While communities have exercised agency to generate local impact and promote trust, the overwhelming impact of climate change necessitates effective state responses, and regional and global cooperation.2 Global cooperation, in turn, needs to better address the challenges to peace and security faced by regions most exposed to the impacts of climate change. Southeast Asia is already experiencing direct climate change impacts from changes in temperature, precipitation, sea-level rise, ocean warming, and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. The subsequent indirect climate change impacts on food and water security, and changes in natural resource exploitation and migration patterns, affect the lives and livelihoods of people and communities across the highly diverse region and threaten its peace and security

CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS IMPACT ON PEACE AND SECURITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Climate change is today one of the greatest risks to peace and security, but arguably remains at the margins of policy action amid the loss of trust in multilateral institutions. The impacts of climate change are already felt by local communities in regions on the frontline. While communities have exercised agency to generate local impact and promote trust, the overwhelming impact of climate change necessitates effective state responses, and regional and global cooperation. Global cooperation, in turn, needs to better address the challenges to peace and security faced by regions most exposed to the impacts of climate change. Southeast Asia is already experiencing direct climate change impacts from changes in temperature, precipitation, sea-level rise, ocean warming, and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. The subsequent indirect climate change impacts on food and water security, and changes in natural resource exploitation and migration patterns, affect the lives and livelihoods of people and communities across the highly diverse region and threaten its peace and security. In Southeast Asia, the cross-cutting impacts of climate change on peace and security can be analysed through the framework of comprehensive security. Comprehensive security is the organising concept of security in the region, integrated and widely reflected in the security lexicon in the ASEAN region and beyond. Unlike the conventional notion of security, which is narrowly defined to mean defending state borders from military attack, comprehensive security is a much broader conceptualisation of security that “[goes] beyond (but does not exclude) the military threats to embrace the political, economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

Manila’s Tariff Move on Imported Rice : Implications for the Region

The Philippines’ removal of quotas on rice imports leads to increased competition, with negative short-term impacts on its farmers and on poorer urban ASEAN consumers. In the long-run, however, these challenges may serve as a strong push to upgrade regional rice production practices.Published versio

New Trends in Humanitarian Assistance – Enticing the Private Sector : The Value Chain Approach

Since the Sulawesi quake and tsunami, ASEAN member states have agreed to increase financial contributions to Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations. However, an alternative framing of HADR is needed to draw enterprises in bridging gaps

New Trends in Humanitarian Assistance – The Private Turn in Humanitarian Aid

To bridge funding gaps in humanitarian assistance, states will need to re-examine their roles, relative to the private sector. Humanitarian technologies offer a potential high-volume, low-profit margin sector which can be an entry point for private companies

Volatility in the rice sector: time for ASEAN to act?

How Thailand and Vietnam – two major rice exporters after India – will react to the latter’s recent rice export ban will depend very much on expectations of how long the ban will last. Should rice exporters in these countries engage in price speculation, global food security can be put at risk. It is time for ASEAN to explore how price speculation in the rice trade can be prevented.Published versio

Uncertainty in the black sea: implications for Asia's food security

There has been increasing uncertainty, with Russia opting out from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and re-joining five days later. In this brief period, wheat and maize prices jumped for commodity traders. These events portend continuing instability in supply of essential food items amid the Ukraine war and putting Asia’s food security at risk.Published versio

It's not the size, but how it's used: lesson for ASEAN rice reserves

ASEAN’s approach to stabilising rice markets and averting crises has focused on having sufficient rice stocks as a buffer. Insights from stabilisation in currency markets show that reserve size is not as important as the way it is used to reduce overall risk exposure

Has Southeast Asia reached a new normal in food security? Dissecting the impacts of COVID-19 as a hybrid health–economic crisis

Has COVID-19 opened the way towards a “new normal” in food security in Southeast Asia and the world over, and what are its policy implications? This question is pertinent from a policy perspective since the pandemic falls under the classification of “wicked” problems. Such problems are by nature “complex, unpredictable, open ended, or intractable”.COVID-19 is multifaceted and multi-sectoral in nature, having led to a hybrid crisis in the health and economic sectors, i.e., a “hybrid health–economic crisis”. To understand the pandemic’s impacts on food security, this chapter contextualises the challenges amid COVID-19 in light of those faced in the pre-COVID-19 “old normal”. This approach allows for ascertaining whether these are really new problems or simply variants of the old problems. This chapter argues that while COVID-19 presents a significant challenge to food security, it is not entirely new in the context of the previous challenges faced in the pre-COVID era. Nonetheless, the pandemic provides impetus to exploring transformative efforts in addressing age-old food system challenges.Published versio