Asia Economy

Hailed by Chinese President Xi Jinping as “the project of the century”, the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative promises to radically transform a vast swathe of the world’s trade and transport infrastructure. In doing so, it may also transform the way Asia does business with the world, and the way the world does business with Asia.

From a historical perspective, economic globalisation resulted from growing social productivity, and is a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress, not something created by any individual or country. Economic globalisation has powered global growth and facilitated the movement of goods and capital, advances in science,...

Indonesia and the Netherlands are strategic partners in a future-oriented relationship. This is no surprise, given our shared history and interest in each other. The foundations of our relationship are deep and go right back to the late 16th century, when a small Dutch merchant fleet landed at Banten, not far from modern-day Jakarta. It went...

While the Republic of Indonesia is just over seven decades old in its current form, the South-east Asian nation of more than 17,000 islands has a much longer history under other names. The name Indonesia was first used in 1850 by British anthropologist James Richardson Logan in referring to the extensive group of islands that was known at the...

One of the world’s largest democracies, with a population of around 259m spread across some 17,000 islands, Indonesia today faces some complex political challenges. Home to dozens of different ethnicities, several major religions and hundreds of languages and dialects, governance has long required a balancing of centralising and decentralising...