European and Asian finance ministers met on the Indonesian resort island of Bali yesterday to boost cooperation in trade, investment and finance as the world economy shows scattered signs of recovery.
The annual Asian-Meeting European gathering of officials from the EU, China, Japan and eight other Asian nations are expected to stress closer coordination in macroeconomic policy between their regions, home to about a third of the world's population.
"European countries are entering into an integrated single market, while we have just started to strengthen our bond market. There will be talks on how to synergise these efforts," said Indonesia's chief economics minister, Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti.
But, as in previous ASEM ministerial forums, new policies of substance are unlikely by the end of the two days of talks, and much of the agenda centers on technical issues, such as pooling ideas on how to keep Asia's fledgling financial markets stable.
The Bali meeting comes less than two weeks after 11 Asia-Pacific nations launched a new US$1 billion Asia Bond Fund, drawn from their huge central bank reserves, to speed development of a regional bond market.
That Thai initiative is seen as a catalyst for Asia to woo back some of its assets invested outside the region, especially in US bonds.
But delegates in Bali said the weekend meeting would only touch lightly on ways to develop the fund.
"The Asian Bond Fund is not central to the meetings," one European delegate told reporters.
Asia has around two-thirds of global foreign exchange reserves but its bond markets are less developed. Many Asian companies still rely on short-term bank loans for funding, raising the risk of volatility if banks cut credit lines.
In Asia's financial crisis of 1997, the banks did just that, and Asian policy makers are now under pressure to find ways to funnel savings directly into Asian investments, bypassing Western financial institutions, to nourish future growth.
"The bond market in Asia is still weak. If we really want to have a stronger financial system in Asia after the crisis, the Asian bond market must be further developed," said Kuntjoro-Jakti.
At last year's ASEM meeting in Copenhagen, leaders agreed to set up a special task force of 10 experts to work on boosting cooperation between the EU and Asia in the areas of trade, investment and finance.
The EU and Asian officials are also trying to find ways to avoid a stalemate at the WTO liberalization talks launched at Doha in Qatar, in the run-up to a ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in September.
Some states, such as China, are concerned the round will founder on a lack of consensus.
Japanese Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa said he would discuss the removal of obstacles to trade, such as regulations, during three-way talks with counterparts from China and South Korea on the sidelines of yesterday's meetings.
But he said he did not plan to press the issue of revaluation of China's yuan currency, a hot topic following complaints from US and Japanese manufacturers that China was keeping the yuan artificially low, in turn hurting their exports.
"I have no plans to bring up the issue of revaluation directly," he said late on Friday.
Beijing has so far denied that it might allow the yuan, also known as the renminbi, to be revalued higher.
The ASEM forum, set up five years ago in the aftermath of the region's financial crisis, will also discuss various options to fight poverty under the theme of a Millennium Development Goal.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts