Japan is to announce US$100 billion in new funding for Asian infrastructure, the same size as the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Jiji Press reported.
The money is to be invested over five years and include yen loans, funding through the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and private investment, the Japanese news agency said, without citing anyone.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is to give details tomorrow, according to the report.
Japan’s plan comes as representatives of 57 nations meet in Singapore later this week to thrash out details of how the AIIB is to operate. Japan and the US have not said they would join the new China-led institution, with Japan expressing concern over its governance.
The Japan-led Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently said it would boost its annual lending and grant approvals by 50 percent to as much as US$20 billion. The plan to be announced by Abe tomorrow also includes strengthened lending through the ADB, Jiji reported.
The Jiji report did not say how much of the funding would be new, or how it compared to previous investment levels.
Meanwhile, the new China-led AIIB is considering giving senior staff more power over loan approval than at existing multilateral lenders to speed up the decisionmaking process, officials familiar with the talks said.
Under proposals to be discussed this week in Singapore, the board of directors, which represents member countries, would not sit at the lender’s headquarters. The threshold and conditions to delegate loan decisions to management have not yet been agreed, according to the officials from founder-member countries, who asked not to be named as the talks are not public.
China, which lined up the support of 56 nations for the US$100 billion bank, wants to set it apart from institutions such as the World Bank, which borrowers have criticized for having too many conditions and authorization layers.
“In the past there’s been a lot of complaints that the multilateral institutions — the board — can be heavy handed in the operations, so there will be room for improvement,” Justin Lin Yifu (林毅夫), a former chief economist at the World Bank, said in an interview on Monday in Singapore. “But at the same time, I think that to have some kind of supervision from the board would be desirable.”
The Beijing-based AIIB, which is recruiting Chinese and international staff, would be unusual in forgoing an on-site executive board, marking out a contrast with institutions such as the ADB or the African Development Bank.
Decisions could be made more quickly and efficiently without a board physically present, said Lin, who is now a director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University.
Chief negotiators are to meet in Singapore from today to Friday to discuss draft articles of agreement and the bank’s operational policies, the Singaporean Ministry of Finance said in a statement yesterday.
The meeting is to be chaired by Chinese Vice Minister of Finance Shi Yaobin (史耀斌) and Singaporean Ministry of Finance Deputy Secretary of Policy Yee Ping Yi, it said.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day