Since 2000, China has spent US$843 billion on bilateral aid. That is around US$39.5 billion per year, similar to the amount provided by the United States (US), the world’s largest donor of foreign aid.

Bad news travels. Good news doesn’t. When Afghanistan’s government collapsed recently, the whole world watched. But when Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, produces the world’s most effective democratically elected leader today – President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi – almost no one outside the archipelago knows the story. That story is all the more remarkable because Jokowi has succeeded in one of the world’s most difficult countries to govern.

China hands out at least twice as much development money as the United States (US) and other major powers, new evidence shows, with most of it coming in the form of risky high-interest loans from Chinese state banks.The sheer amount of Chinese lending is startling.

Many people say that damage to the environment is a risk of development. Based on this belief, there is also the assumption that it is impossible that development without destroying the environment can be realized.

With 2021 still young, and hope in the air thanks to new COVID-19 vaccines and a new occupant in the White House, we can finally stop covering our eyes in horror and peer furtively into the future. As the decade unfolds, which countries are likely to be the biggest economic success stories?

The ongoing pandemic might have slowed down the advancement of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but not its coverage in the media. Pundits and scholars across the world have kept publishing opinion articles and analyses on a daily basis speculating about its demise, or its reboot.

On 14 October, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the southern city of Shenzhen, where he delivered a speech celebrating 40 years of progress since the special economic zone (SEZ) was established there and set a path for the future. A month later, Xi headed to Shanghai’s Pudong district – which was designated China’s first “new area” 30 years earlier – for the same purpose.

Early this month, on the 40th anniversary of Shenzhen’s designation as a (SEZ), Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled a blueprint for building the city into a trade, finance, and technology hub. Most China-watchers have focused on what this means for Hong Kong, Shanghai, or at most the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area.

The Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) opened for business in 2016 and rapidly established itself as a major multilateral development institution. It now aims to become the world’s leading financier of large-scale infrastructure by 2021. But the bank first needs to raise its game regarding timely public disclosure of its projects’ environmental and social risks.The AIIB currently has 82 member states, with a further 21 countries expected to join soon.

With Vietnam starting its chairmanship of the Association of South East Nations (ASEAN) this year, it is worth exploring ideas to reinvigorate and reenergize the bloc from a perspective of its citizens, specifically through the lens of its youth.Is the bloc capable of coming up with transformative and out of the box ideas that can match the aspirations of millions of youths living in Southeast Asia; offering them a vision, hope and a common platform to hone their skills for a shared prosperou