Blogs

The first year of President Marcos has been one bracketed by an impressive electoral victory and a continuing high approval rating that has hovered between the mid-60s and mid-70s. In between, the economy has experienced healthy gross domestic product (GDP) growth ending 2022 at a high of 7 percent and moderating to 6.4 percent after the first quarter of this year.

It was nice to see US Secretary of State Blinken visit Beijing and hold substantive talks with President Xi Jinping and other top leaders in China. But, relations between the two have deteriorated so badly that the most that can be achieved will be guard rails that prevent the two powers’ tussles from escalating into outright clashes. In the meantime, there will be spillovers into the global economy.

Over the last three decades of rapid globalisation, global corporations created new supply chains by breaking down production processes and allocating slices of production to locations which could produce them most efficiently. This helped to create production networks that spanned many countries, with a particular product often crossing borders several times before the final good reached the consumer.

One of the defining developments of our time is the increasingly fractious relationship between the US and China. No one should under-estimate the dangers posed by two nuclear-armed big powers pushing and shoving against each other.

One of the defining developments of our time is the increasingly fractious relationship between the US and China. No one should under-estimate the dangers posed by two nuclear-armed big powers pushing and shoving against each other. That is all the more the case for Southeast Asia which will be one of the principal arenas for that big power contest.