About a decade ago we observed that there was no easily communicable growth strategy we could recommend to policymakers in the middle income economies in Asia.

Unlike many countries in Asia, and indeed in the world, Vietnam is for the moment blessed with a raft of positive economic news. But beneath the surface, structural problems and a lack of industrial deepening persist. Exports have been growing at 18 per cent year-on-year and 10 per cent year-to-date. Disbursements in foreign direct investment rose by some 9.6 per cent year-on-year with Samsung, in particular, manufacturing not only its smartphones but also TV and computer screens in Vietnam.

China seems to have abandoned its cautious approach to relations with Pakistan and has adopted a policy of active and deep engagement. This new approach will most likely increase Beijing’s influence in Islamabad.

The first 100 days of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and his government were distinguished by historic reforms to fuel subsidies, social assistance to the poor, streamlined investment licensing and virtually no new restrictive regulations on foreign trade. Fuel subsidy reform has given the government fiscal space for infrastructure development. But if Indonesia is to attract greater foreign investment, there is still scope to promote openness and regional integration in what is a critical year for Indonesia’s involvement in international trade agreements.

The ageing of Japan’s population is globally unprecedented both in its level and its speed. The proportion of people aged 65 years old and over is now more than one-quarter of the total population of Japan — proportionally, the largest in the world. This will grow to one-third of the total population in 2035. It took only 24 years — from 1970 to 1994 — for the proportion of Japanese people aged over 65 to increase from 7 per cent to 14 per cent. In European countries it took between 50 and 100 years, and in some cases even longer. Japan’s population has aged twice as fast as Germany’s and more than four times faster than France’s.

Bank Indonesia (BI) surprised everyone when it eased monetary policy at its February meeting. Moving into line with global trends, it cut the policy interest rate by 25 basis points to 7.5 per cent, even though analysts had predicted no change. While the change is surprising, it has a sound rationale but is not without risk. Recent developments are supportive of a more benign inflation picture. BI follows a forward-looking inflation targeting policy regime. Headline inflation is declining more quickly than expected with the February rate at 6.3 per cent. It seems the feed through of the November fuel price hikes were largely one-off and the strong dollar has not shaped inflation.

India was one of the hardest hit of the emerging markets after the US Federal Reserve first hinted it would cut back its quantitative easing program in May 2013. There were three reasons for this. First, global markets over-reacted. Second, India had many macroeconomic weaknesses. Third, since its capital markets were deep and liquid enough, they offered an avenue for portfolio managers targeting reduced exposure to emerging markets. But since this blow, there have been corrections in all three areas. So the final withdrawal of US quantitative easing (QE), which the US Federal Reserve announced at the end of October, will not have a similar effect on the Indian economy.

There have been promises of greater Indian investment in South Asia for a long time. A report produced by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 2007 argued that India would play a key role in investing in South Asia and this in turn will stimulate intra-regional trade in the region. The report made special reference to the rapidly growing Indian IT industry and identified it as a potential investor in South Asia. The ADB argued that business process outsourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, call centres and other IT related sub-contracting would shift to regional countries as a response to increased costs of doing business in India.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) announced in February 2014 that the country maintained single-digit inflation for five consecutive years for the first time since independence. For a country that has historically suffered from both high and volatile rates of inflation, this achievement is no mean feat. The scale of this accomplishment becomes clear when comparing the country’s monetary environment to that of 2008, when annual inflation peaked at 22.6 per cent before settling to single-digit levels from February 2009.

The publication of Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century has brought the issue of income inequality to the fore of public policy debates in many countries. This is remarkable, given the book’s length (696 pages), the intricacy of the historical data series that forms the statistical foundations of the book’s main propositions, and its relatively narrow geographical focus (mainly the US, the UK, and Western Europe). The issues of inequality, social mobility prospects, fairness and adequacy of social protection arrangements have recently risen to prominence in public policy debates in Singapore, and this is likely to continue.