Economy and commerce

Ministers from 16 Asia-Pacific nations failed to reach an agreement on creating the world’s largest free trade area at their meeting on Friday, a Thai negotiator suggested, but some are optimistic about the chances of a deal by year-end. A senior Japanese government official told reporters ...

Thailand plans to seek talks with the United States on a decision to end preferential trade privileges on a range of Thai exports including seafood, officials said Monday. Keerati Rushchano, acting director-general of the Commerce Ministry’s Foreign Trade Department, said his office has been warning exporters ...

Vietnam’s leading dairy producer TH Group, the first Vietnamese enterprise granted transaction codes to export milk products to China, looked forward to tapping opportunities for Vietnam’s dairy products brought by the upgrading protocol of China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA). At a ceremony marking Vietnam’s export of ...

Thailand’s Department of Foreign Trade will announce on Monday the details of its suspension of duty-free treatment for some Thai products under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). This follows US suspension on Friday of such preferred treatment for Thai products worth around US$1.3 billion, citing ...

Despite the slowdown in global deal-making due to ongoing worldwide economic uncertainty, Vietnam remains active in M&A in 2020, according to a new report by Baker McKenzie. The firm’s fifth annual Global Transactions Forecast, jointly released with Oxford Economics, projects that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) will ...

Political leaders are under constant pressure to introduce new initiatives, because new implies better, and that’s the nature of politics. Even clever repackaging of previous efforts is often not enough. So, it was quite a surprise when, in June 2018, Thai prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha ...

Despite rising trade tensions and geopolitical risks, half of ASEAN’s member states are among the top drivers of global growth. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) World Economic Outlook released last week painted a bleak future for the global economy which is in a “synchronised slowdown” and ...

Veerathai Santiprabhob, governor of the Bank of Thailand, and his Myanmar counterpart U Kyaw Kyaw Maung, signed two memoranda of understanding (MoU) on October 18 during the IMF-World Bank meeting in the US. The signing was witnessed by Myanmar’s Minister for Planning and Finance U Soe ...

Digital consumers in ASEAN will be spending three times as much in 2025 according to a new study from Facebook and Bain & Company. The joint study by the social media giant and global management consultants released this week found that while consumers in Southeast Asia ...

China will step up cooperation with the five Mekong countries in the textile and apparel sectors, according to the China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC). More efforts will be made to strengthen trade and investment interaction and improve cooperation mechanisms, so as to deepen the ...