Two activities in Malaysia that emit large amounts of CO 2 are electricity generation, and iron and steel production. To decarbonize the former, Malaysia should invest in a flexible energy system to overcome the intermittent characteristic of solar energy by influencing the pattern of demand with peak load pricing, increasing energy storage capability, and entering into a regional electricity grid arrangement. Malaysia should respond to the recent large capacity expansion in iron and steel production with blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) technology by ending immediately the issuance of new licenses for facilities that use this BF-BOF technology, and speed up the process of adopting advanced green, near-zero emission technologies (e.g., Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology [HYBRIT]), by applying for foreign technical assistance (e.g., the United Nations Climate Technology Center and Networks [UN-CTCN]) and for concessionary climate finance under the Paris Agreement. Finally, to be consistent with the 1.5°C pathway for the world, Malaysia should aim to commit to achieve peak carbon emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050.

The key practices in successful government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are (1) early border controls to contain the initial spread of the virus from abroad; (2) rapidly increasing the capacity of national health systems in terms of mobilizing staff, securing supplies (e.g., protective equipment and respiratory devices), and optimizing space (e.g., ensuring adequate numbers of acute and intensive care beds) to scale up testing-tracing-treating infrastructure; (3) promoting individual hygienic behavior such as social distancing and face mask use, which requires, respectively, active government enforcement of regulations against holding spreader events, and strong government intervention in the market to ensure adequate supplies; (4) fiscal measures to extend disaster relief to workers, businesses, and vulnerable populations; and (5) clear, concise, and consistent communications from leaders and authorities. International cooperation must have a key role in the fight against the pandemic. So far, a global response to the crisis has been glaringly absent. Although it is understandable that countries prioritize their own needs, it must be understood that no country is safe until every other country is also safe. Global access to future vaccines, supplies, tests, and treatments is the only way to ensure the virus is truly eradicated within a country. The richer countries should establish a global fund to provide the poor countries with the needed vaccine, and to enhance their efforts in testing, tracing, and treating COVID-19 cases.

The United States declared trade war after substantial defections from the internationalist (in geo-strategy and economics) lobby in U.S. politics to a new coalition between conflict-is-inevitable activists and anti-globalization proponents. Many internationalist businesses changed sides after experiencing disappointments on economic fronts including China's non-compliance with some of its World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations, China's acquisition of foreign technology at lower-than-expected prices, and the serious inadequacies in the WTO's governance of global trade. Many of the disillusioned internationalists have given too much weight to the contribution of globalization to negative developments in the U.S. labor market, and too little weight to the role of powerful capital-biased technological changes and to the inadequacies of state-provided programs for social insurance and human capital formation. Resolution of the trade war and prevention of its frequent occurrence will become more likely when (a) China adopts much greater reciprocity in its economic engagement with the advanced countries despite its status as a developing country under WTO rules; and (b) the United States stops equating geo-strategic competition with economic competition, recognizes that economic dynamism and economic resilience comes from strengthening indigenous innovation capability rather than from holding China back technologically, and institutes social programs to significantly reduce the trauma that is created by frequent job changes. Deep reform of the WTO is urgently needed but is unlikely to happen in the medium run. For the medium run, the United States should mobilize country cooperation in regional settings (like the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP]) to introduce policy innovations to serve as templates for a re-designed WTO architecture, and to harness collective market power to be used in future negotiations on WTO reform.

From a data set of Chinese firms in the 2005–07 period, we find that government investment boosted the performance of zombie firms and crowded out the growth of private firms; we also found that the higher the concentration of state banks (and of state-owned enterprises), the more conducive is the environment for nurturing zombie firms. With the exit of zombie firms, (a) the industrial output growth rate would be higher by 2.12 percentage points, (b) the capital accumulation rate would be higher by 1.4 percentage points, (c) the employment growth rate would be higher by 0.84 percentage points, and (d) the rate total factor productivity growth would be higher by 1.06 percentage points. Our results support a radical change in the way that government investment has been carried out, and support comprehensive reform of the state sector, but they do not necessarily argue against government investment in large infrastructure projects and strategically-critical areas.

This paper develops a multiple-goal investment strategy for sovereign wealth funds. In our investment strategy, we embed the Black-Litterman (B-L) model into the mean variance mental accounting (MVMA) approach. The B-L method provides a means of modeling return expectations, and the MVMA framework allows the derivation of the optimal asset allocation from a global investment perspective, in a response to a specific macroeconomic environment.

Official Chinese data on urban household income are seriously flawed because of significant underreporting of income by respondents and non-participation by the high income groups in official household surveys. We collected urban household income and expenditure data in a way that increased their reliability and the coverage of the wealthy. We utilized the well-known relationship between Engel's coefficient and income level through two different approaches to deduce the true level of household income for each of the seven Chinese income categories (lowest income, low income, lower middle income, middle income, upper middle income, high income, and highest income). We found that the ratio of our estimated income to official income increased from 1.12 for the lowest income group to 3.19 for the highest income group. Total household disposable income in 2008 is RMB 14.0 trillion according to the official data but RMB 23.2 trillion according to our estimate; and 63 percent of the unreported income went to the wealthiest 10 percent of urban households. The income of the wealthiest 10 percent of Chinese households is really 65 times that of the poorest 10 percent instead of the 23 times reported in the official data. The Gini coefficient is clearly much higher than the usually reported figure of 0.47. In one of the estimations, we had to drop the 76 wealthiest households (1.8 percent of our sample) from the analysis because there were no super-rich in the official data for us to match characteristics with. We therefore still understate the income of the highest income households. As the amount of unreported income indicates the degree of corruption, it is troubling that it grew 91 percent in 2005–08 compared to the 71 percent growth in gross national income. Serious institutional reforms must be enacted if corruption is not to derail economic development and social harmony.

China has been accused of exchange rate manipulation that has caused large U.S. trade deficits, which have reduced U.S. welfare by increasing unemployment and reducing wages. In fact, the strong claims by some observers that the trade imbalances are deeply deleterious to China's welfare almost make it a moral imperative for the United States to use tariffs to force an renminbi (RMB) appreciation for China's own good.

Our simulations of a global macroeconomic model suggest that China's WTO accession could create significant welfare losses in the ASEAN-4 if foreign direct investment (FDI) is significantly redirected away from these countries toward China, and if the ASEAN-4 countries are unable to implement policies to make up for the slower rate of technological diffusion from the reduced FDI inflow. If the ASEAN-4 do not fall behind technologically, then they will be able to find lucrative niches within the lengthened international manufacturing production chains. The ASEAN-4 must therefore strengthen their abilities to absorb new foreign technologies quickly and to engage in indigenous technical innovations.

Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996–99. Their respective contributions in percentage points were 2.5 and 3.5 for the province-level metropolises, 0.6 and 2.3 for the northeastern provinces, 2.8 and 2.8 for the coastal provinces, 2.0 and 1.6 for the central provinces, 0 and 1.6 for the northwestern provinces, and 0.1 and 1.8 for the southwestern provinces. Because the so-called preferential policies are largely deregulation policies that have allowed coastal Chinese provinces to integrate into the international economy, it is far superior to reduce regional disparity by extending these deregulation policies to the interior provinces than by re-regulating the coastal provinces. Two additional inhibitions to income convergence are the household registration system, which makes the movement of the rural poor to prosperous areas illegal, and the monopoly state bank system that, because of its bureaucratic nature, disburses most of its funds to its large traditional customers, few of whom are located in the western provinces. Improving infrastructure to overcome geographic barriers is fundamental to increasing western growth, but increasing human capital formation (education and medical care) is also crucial because only it can come up with new better ideas to solve centuries-old problems like unbalanced growth.