With Kevin Rudd visiting Indonesia next week, thoughts are turning to what 'deliverables' he might achieve. As I argue in the AFR today, the visit won’t revolutionise our relationship, but it is important to shift it a notch higher, to reflect Indonesia’s return to being a 'normal&#

It is surprising how little serious discussion there has been on the political economy of the proposed BHP take-over of Rio. The commercial negotiations wind their tortuous way forward, and the purchase of Rio shares by Chinalco is seen as a response by China Inc to the threat of an iron ore near-

It was only a little news item with an obscure acronym, but Australia has decided to withdraw from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Some might ask why we ever joined in the first place, but its London headquarters was a very pleasant spot to send supernumerary bureaucrats

There are many thing to fret about in life, but the impact of the Jevons Paradox on oil consumption isn't one of them. If hybrid cars are so spectacularly efficient that we all drive that much more, governments could easily fix this problem by taxing oil more. Come to think of it, even

We’ve commented before about the inconsistency of US economic guru Larry Summers, and we wonder afresh after his discussion of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) at the Davos World Economic Forum. He suspects that these SWF investors have 'mixed motives' which will divert them from the pure

The death of former Indonesian president Soeharto will trigger another round of debate about his contribution. Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, whose country was a major beneficiary in the decades of stability after Sukarno’s 'konfrontasi', acknowledged the overwhelmingly positive balance to

One of the central elements is assessing Soeharto’s role in history is to judge the extent and causes of the 1965 killings in Java and Bali, and the degree to which Soeharto himself was responsible. The first part is being decided by a form of auction: by whoever dares to name a higher figure (

Reader Paul Dickie has this to add to the debate, which started with my post here, and continued with responses from Kerry Duce and Peter McCawley: Investors and policy makers are now up at night worrying about sovereign wealth funds, those in-the-news investment funds controlled by

A post-script to Malcolm Cook’s Incoming Government Brief on East Asian regionalism: for Australia, there are some important issues in the way the international economic architecture is evolving. In the region, it is clearly in our interests that more of the action goes to the East Asia Summit (

Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but it certainly doesn’t constrain great ones. Larry Summers is former US Treasury Secretary, former Harvard President, one of the smartest economists of his generation, and was a member of Time Magazine’s 'committee to save the world'

Sam Roggeveen's short post on China, arguing it is no longer rising but is risen, brought this response from reader Julian Rowberry: China have risen a great deal.  They still have a great deal further to rise.  But the only conclusion I can gather from Petrochina is that their