Last month, I lamented that the leaders of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) seem incapable of agreeing on coordinated policies that would benefit their own economies and the world.

COVID-19 has exposed the myriad weaknesses of cross-border value chains. Once the backbone of globalization, now they are associated with vulnerability to disruption. Thanks to the pandemic, value chains are being reconfigured with a focus on resilience. At the same time, China’s changing role in the global economy is forcing companies to reconsider it as a manufacturing hub. The world’s factory has reinvented itself as the world’s investor.

Many among the political detractors and critique of Rodrigo Duterte have claimed that the President’s trust rating and popularity have declined based on the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey. Such speculations came out after media networks reported a drop in Duterte’s satisfaction numbers based on the latest results of the SWS survey.

According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, we will overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius (C) Paris Agreement threshold from the most to least optimistic scenario unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide occur now. As time is ticking towards mid-century, carbon sequestration could be the fundamental option to reduce emissions rapidly and decelerate global warming. Several countries have started investing in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-China relations, a significant year indeed. I knew very little about ASEAN until 2003, when I got involved in the Track II processes in East Asia which then resulted in my academic focus on ASEAN-centred regional cooperation. Regarding each other as a strategic opportunity is a key to the extraordinary progress of the 30 years’ ASEAN-China relations.

The concept of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting standards has gone mainstream. Major Wall Street firms have adopted ESG standards as a guide to responsible investment, compelling the thousands of corporations in which they invest to do so as well. But is ESG helping investors and corporations that operate in the Global South allocate capital more efficiently?

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.

As United States (US) President Joe Biden’s administration implements its strategy of great power competition with China, analysts seek historical metaphors to explain the deepening rivalry. But while many invoke the onset of the Cold War, a more worrisome historical metaphor is the start of World War I. In 1914, all the great powers expected a short third Balkan War.

The pandemic has made global aging impossible to ignore as COVID-19-related mortality rises sharply with age. The intersection of the pandemic and this new demographic reality has exposed a gap in our global governance architecture. There is no single international institution responsible for safeguarding the rights and advocating for the interests of the world’s fastest-growing age group – those 65 and over.

The top diplomat of the Philippines issued a statement published on the Department of Foreign Affairs’ website on 19 September, 2021 saying that “The Philippines welcomes Australia’s decision to establish an enhanced trilateral security partnership with the US primarily and the UK.