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Business Line July 21, 2020 Redesigning global supply chains post Covid lockdowns The reslience of global supply chains is important for future trade growth. To save them from more crises, stronger buyer-seller partnership and a fairer distribution of risk are needed. When the shutters came down on China, the European Union and the US in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic, the disruptions to global trade were profound. But, within these challenges there laid opportunities for more resilient and inclusive supply chains to arise. Reference: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/redesigning-global-supply-chains-post-covid-lockdowns/article32148416.ece

The Indian Express February 27, 2020 As Trump visits India, on the table: plan to counter China’s reach with Blue Dot network With China moving to expand its strategic footprint through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), India and the US will discuss the Blue Dot network, a new proposal to cover infrastructure and development projects across the region and other countries. The Blue Dot network is “a multi-stakeholder initiative to bring together governments, the private sector and civil society to promote high-quality, trusted standards for global infrastructure development”, sources said. The US, which is leading the proposal, has already got Japan and Australia as partners in this idea. The proposal, which is part of the US’s Indo-Pacific strategy, is aimed at countering Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitious One Belt One Road initiative, and is expected to be part of talks over the next two days between visiting US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Na...

Amar Diwakar/10/AUG/2018 Is China leveraging infrastructure loans to extract geo-strategic concessions from its debtors? In a short span of time, China has taken the lead in establishing an impressive array of international financial institutions to fuel its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – President Xi Jinping’s signature $8 trillion infrastructure investment plan spanning Asia, Europe and Africa. These include the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the New Development Bank, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement. Together, they represent an emerging counter-weight to the Western-led financial architecture piloted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has dominated the global economic order since the introduction of the Bretton Woods system following the Second World War. This should come as no surprise: as China positions itself as the champion of globalisation in the face of what observers diagnose as the intractable ...

Financial Express August 06, 2018 By Pragya Srivastava Contrary to the common belief that the world has not become a better place, data show that extreme poverty has dropped by almost 90% in the last 100 years. In 1910, 82.4% of people were living in extreme poverty, which shrank to a mere 9.6% in 2015. Presently, the World Bank’s poverty line is $1.90 per day. “In 1950 three-quarters of the world were living in extreme poverty; in 1981 it was still 44%. For 2015 – the last year for which we currently have data – research suggests that the share in extreme poverty has fallen below 10%,” Our World in Data, an Oxford University project said, adding that it’s a huge achievement. The research pointed out that people make the general mistake of thinking that the world is static and nothing much is changing. However, if looked from the long-term perspective, the world has made remarkable progress in eradicating extreme poverty. “To see where we are coming from we mus...

The Indian Express, February 11, 2018 IMF chief Christine Lagarde on Sunday gave a clarion call for countries to create the required environment for job creation, warning that unemployment can trigger dangers of youth radicalisation and deeper poverty. Asserting that memories of the 2008 financial crisis are “still alive and not gone away”, Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), underlined the need to learn lessons from the recent global shift towards protectionism. “People without jobs can lead to conditions like countries going deeper into poverty and radicalisation,” she said. In his address to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said “many countries are becoming inward focused and globalisation is shrinking and such tendencies can’t be considered lesser risk than terrorism or climate change”. Lagarde was speaking at a session entitled ‘Navigating a Shifting Global Landscape’ on the open...

T he Indian Express January 24, 2018 Making a case for eliminating rifts and differences to build a new world order, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday flagged the rising threat of protectionism, saying that a new layer of tariff and non-tariff barriers were being erected with countries increasingly focusing inward. Speaking at the World Economic Forum on his first visit to Davos, the first by an Indian Prime Minister in 20 years, Modi also pitched for India as an investment destination, emphasising on efforts to improve the ease of doing business. “We have made it so easy to invest in India, manufacture in India and work in India. We have decided to uproot licence and permit Raj. We are replacing red tape with red carpet,” he said in his keynote address on the opening day of the WEF. Highlighting how technology was influencing the way we work and live today, the Prime Minister said, “He who is able to control data will control the world.” http://indianexpress...

Times of India January 23, 2018 For the emir of Qatar, there has been little that money can't buy. As a teenager he dreamed of becoming the Boris Becker of the Arab world, so his parents flew the German tennis star to Qatar to give their son lessons. A lifelong sports fanatic, he later bought a French soccer team, Paris St-Germain, which last summer paid $263 million for a Brazilian striker — the highest transfer fee in the history of the game. He helped bring the 2022 World Cup to Qatar at an estimated cost of $200 billion, a major coup for a country that had never qualified for the tournament. Now at age 37, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani has run into a problem that money alone cannot solve. Since June, tiny Qatar has been the target of a punishing air and sea boycott led by its largest neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Overnight, airplanes and cargo ships bound for Qatar were forced to change course,diplomatic ties were severed+ , an...

AFP, APP, December 29, 2017 The United States is prepared to partner with Pakistan to defeat terrorist organisations seeking safe havens, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Wednesday. In an opinion piece titled 'I Am Proud of Our Diplomacy', the US's top diplomat said Pakistan "must demonstrate its desire to partner with us" to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists. "Pakistan must contribute by combating terrorist groups on its own soil," he wrote, adding that a commitment to stopping terrorism and extremism had motivated the Trump administration to unveil a new South Asia strategy, which focuses on Afghanistan. “That country [Afghanistan] cannot become a safe haven for terrorists, as it was in the days before the Sept 11 attacks.” Read: 'Trump has put Pakistan on notice,' US VP Pence warns in surprise Kabul visit Tillerson defended his country...

THE HINDU C. Rammanohar Reddy December 26, 2017 As the U.S. loses interest in multilateralism in trade, India should actively try to arrest the organisation’s slide  Less than 25 years after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created, its future as a body overseeing multilateral trade rules is in doubt. The failure of the recent ministerial meeting at Buenos Aires is only symptomatic of a decline in its importance. Too ambitious? When the WTO was born in 1995, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it was given a large remit overseeing the rules for world trade. It was also given powers to punish countries which violated these rules. Yet, in what must be an unusual development in the history of international institutions, the WTO has been felled by the weight of the extraordinary ambitions placed on it. As a consequence, since the late 2000s, the organisation has been unable to carry out its basic task of overseeing a successful conduct of m...