World

The high demand for housing is not being met in Indonesia due to a lack of supply. For Indonesian people, a house can only be a house if it is on the ground — not in a flat or apartment. This increases market demand for land and property, which drives prices to increase. But rising prices are not being matched by proportionate income increases. In response to this difficulty, the Indonesian government established the Public Housing Savings Management Agency — Tapera — in 2016. Due to socioeconomic developments, the government updated this regulation to now compel all Indonesian workers to participate in the Tapera program, with a monthly contribution of three per cent deducted from their salaries. Salary deductions to fund Tapera enraged the public. Employers were also unhappy, as t...

In Tokyo, Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda is searching for an exit from 23 years of quantitative easing. However, the answers he seeks could lie more in Beijing. Japanese policymakers are as surprised as anyone by the underperformance of China’s economy. Back in January, Team Ueda fully expected a powerful growth boost from Asia’s biggest economy that buttressed the argument for higher borrowing costs. Instead, Japan and its neighbours are grappling with the fallout from Chinese deflation, overcapacity and dithering on efforts to end the property crisis. Even if Chinese exports are thriving, weak import activity is being felt throughout the region. For Ueda to feel comfortable tapping the brakes, he must believe China will add more ...

New Delhi: Roshan Mathew’s initial response to Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage’s script for Paradise was a no. The Malayali actor was worried that it paralleled Anurag Kashyap’s 2020 Netflix hit, Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai, where he played an unemployed husband from Mumbai whose marriage and life unravel in the backdrop of demonetisation. Paradise unfolds in a Sri Lanka grappling with the economic crisis of 2022, when food, fuel and funds were scarce. Once Mathew met Vithanage and went through the plot with him, he knew he had to be a part of the film. He plays a TV producer, who along with his wife, visits Sri Lanka for their fifth wedding anniversary. Paradise, presented by Mani Ratnam and Siva Ananth, and produced by Newton Cinema...

One brutally cold evening when I was still in grade school, a trade delegation from China’s northernmost province turned up at our house in a leafy Midwestern American suburb for dinner. My dad, a public servant with the local Department of Development, marched me up to the delegation’s leader, a man with a personal history shaped by revolution and unimaginable struggle, to shake his hand. It felt like it had been carved out of granite. At a time when Japan was the country deemed America’s most daunting commercial rival, just a handful of years after the opening up of China’s economy, this was a glimpse of the Middle Kingdom’s budding global ambition. Everyone’s had far more than a glimpse by now. That ambition has been putti...

Colombo, Sri Lanka – The bullying from a senior health official was bad enough. A sense of betrayal by government authorities during COVID-19 made it worse. But the economic crisis that pummelled Sri Lanka in the wake of the pandemic was the breaking point for Lahiru Prabodha Gamage. The 35-year-old Sri Lankan doctor left Sri Lanka in January 2023 to take up a job in the United Kingdom, after working in a government hospital in the remote town of Hatton, 120km (75 miles) east of the capital Colombo, for six years. He is now a senior house officer for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). It wasn’t an easy decision. “I really love my country. That will never change,” Gamage told Al Jazeera. “But no matter how much money I earned, I had to pay back huge loans.” And with prices...

It is customary for the Pakistani prime minister to visit China – its all-weather friend and largest bilateral lender – soon after the inauguration ceremony. But Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s five-day visit, from June 4-8, was not about simply following a convention. Pakistan is facing its worst economic crisis in decades. It needs a fresh IMF package; so far it has received 24. Sharif’s delegation included virtually all the key Cabinet ministers, including those for finance, foreign affairs, defence and trade. The delegation also included Army Chief General Asim Munir. This was justified on the grounds that he is a member of the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), a body created to attract foreign investment to Pakistan. More than the technicalities, China’s investment i...

Islamabad, Pakistan — In a series of trips over the past three months, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has tried to convince the debt-strapped country’s three closest allies — China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — to invest in the nation, as its precariously positioned economy looks for green shoots. In June last year, under Sharif’s first tenure as prime minister, the government formed a Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), a high-powered body comprising Pakistani civilian and military leaders, to promote investment in Pakistan. Following the tours to Beijing, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the Sharif government is pointing towards a raft of memorandums of understanding signed on those trips as indicators of potential investment coming to P...