The 2027 RCEP General Review represents a critical opportunity to transform the world’s largest trading bloc into a meaningful anchor against geoeconomic fragmentation in the Asia-Pacific.
Category: Think Tank News
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PIIE: Project Vault needs work
Project Vault’s hybrid public-private design for stockpiling critical minerals raises serious concerns about voluntary participation, operational complexity, and the risk that the programme will fail precisely when it is most needed.
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ISEAS: Malaysia’s geoeconomic alignment under Anwar
Malaysia’s claim to neutrality in the US–China rivalry is undermined by sector-level structural alignment, particularly in semiconductors, which constrains the country’s real policy freedom even when aggregate trade and investment figures appear balanced.
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Cato: Section 122 is Trump’s illegal stopgap
The Trump administration’s invocation of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a 10 percent global tariff is legally and economically flawed, because a goods trade deficit does not constitute a balance-of-payments deficit as the statute intended.
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Cato: Jones Act data reveals universe of blocked trade
Voyage-level data from the Trump administration’s Jones Act waiver demonstrates that the 1920 law has been suppressing intra-US trade by preventing domestic cargo movements that the market clearly wanted to make.
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PIIE: A positive trade policy for US agriculture
US farmers have suffered from the shift away from free trade agreements and from the volatility caused by the Trump administrations’ tariff-driven trade wars.
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ISEAS Cambodia’s economy after the border conflict
Despite significant trade and labour disruptions caused by the 2025 Cambodia–Thailand border conflict, the economic impact on Cambodia has so far been milder than expected for a small, trade-dependent economy.
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USAsia Centre: EU’s growing engagement in the Indo-Pacific
Europe is rapidly deepening its strategic, economic, and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific despite its geographic distance from the region.
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PIIE: US-China interdependence means both opportunities and obstacles
Growing distrust and strategic rivalry have shifted the US-China relationship from mutually beneficial cooperation to costly conflict, and the two countries need a structured, negotiated approach to manage economic disengagement while still collaborating on shared goals.
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ASPI: Fusing Australia’s Economic Statecraft
Australia must deepen the integration of its existing economic, intelligence, and security tools into a fused national economic statecraft capability rather than creating new instruments or simply coordinating disparate agencies.