FGI Blog
FGI Blogs provide up–to-date commentary and analysis from the Institute’s experts and associates on a range of issues related to the Institute’s core research themes and on topical subjects of special interest. To view our house rules for posting comments, please click here.
Pushing Past 400
Posted by on May 15, 2013Sometime in the last week, the world pushed past 400 parts per million (ppm). That is, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the primary driver of global warming - now exceeds 400 (ppm). Given that carbon stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, passing a marker has an air of finality about it. So how fatal is our case?The earth was ...
Going Green in a Very Brown Economy
Posted by on Apr 29, 2013How likely is it that pole position in the race to the global green economy would be held by one of the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf?The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has the enviable claim to 7 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves and a GDP per capita that is eighth in the world, just behind the United States. Emiratis are set for life by dint...
The Conundrum of Asia’s Retirement Age
Posted by on Apr 23, 2013Over the past few months I’ve been doing research for a pension policy brief the Fung Global Institute is currently working on. As a result, I have read a great deal on the subject and what has struck me is that while each paper focuses on a different issue they all share one common concern: the ageing population in many parts of Asia.This demographic chan...
A World Without Economic Models
Posted by on Apr 16, 2013George Soros made a sweeping observation at his lunchtime speech to the recent Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) conference in Hong Kong, co-hosted by the Fung Global Institute and the Centre for Governance and Innovation (CIGI):“Lehman Brothers was an intellectual bankruptcy of an entire conceptual or axiomatic system on which a lot of activities...
Clear and Clean Thinking on Asia’s Economic Future
Posted by on Apr 11, 2013The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has just published its economic outlook for 2013 – and it makes for sobering reading indeed.The economics are rosy enough: going by conventional “more is better” measures of GDP growth. “Developing Asia is bouncing back” the Report states, with GDP growth growing from 6.1 per cent in 2012 to 6.6 per cent in 2013 and...
What Would American Progress on Climate Change Look Like?
Posted by on Mar 28, 2013If the right of a great power is that it doesn’t need to follow a global consensus, the US has played that role masterfully in the past half century. America has preserved an exceptionalism on any number of issues – such as its failure to ratify the UN International Covenant on Human Rights, its defense of the state’s right to teach evolution as scienc...
Gender Inequality and Asia’s Pension Systems
Posted by on Feb 21, 2013Pension reform within Asia has been a matter of urgency for some time now. The main concerns are: sustainability of current benefits; fairness concerning treatment towards various population groups and aging populations. These issues are complex, multi-faceted and vary from country to country. Instead of addressing all the issues at hand, I will focus on a b...
