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This paper builds on the growing literature on the political resource curse by highlighting the potential impacts of risitarianing global commodity prices on good governance and peace-building in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It confirms the existence of the connection between natural resource dependence, armed conflict and weak governance, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. By focusing on the Democratic Republic of Congo, the paper contributes to the ongoing resource curse literature by highlighting the role of various mineral resources, the geographical distribution of such resources as well as the role of international state and non-state actors. The paper argues that the recent shift in the global terms of trade in favour of hard commodities due to the growing demand of China and India will present significant challenges for governance and peace-building as state and non-state actors attempt to gain control over lucrative natural resource rents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With higher shares in world merchandise trade and improvements in product quality, China is better positioned than India in the near term for influencing global trade. From the Malaysian perspective, China represents a non-negligible share in Malaysia's trade. The trends in bilateral trade with both Giants however suggest that competition has intensified. Relative to India, China appears to promulgate a more influential role on Malaysia via higher commodity overlap in external markets, greater matched trade that is of vertical differentiation, distinct quality shifts and negative adjustment pressures. Within this broad rubric of trade-induced changes, there is no evidence of skill upgrading for Malaysia in trade expansion with both Giants. This mirrors the lack of product quality improvements and the low levels of export values of high quality varieties in matched trade. Hence trade induced changes from the Giants that have been cited to be favourable from the Malaysian perspective in previous studies, may have been grossly overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has become the world's call-centre capital and is seen as a major consumer market for multinational companies. But can it also become a global manufacturing powerhouse to rival China? This paper examines the issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flow of information and volatility coming from stock markets of other countries have significant impact on the stock market of a country. Volatility is even higher in the case the countries enjoy good economic conditions among themselves. The present manuscript aims to probe into the spread of impacts over a large range of returns and volatility in four major equity markets of Asia viz. India, China, Hongkong and Japan for a period of 18 years ranging from 2000 to 2017. The study uses VAR based GARCH model to determine the volatility spillover among the chosen countries for the period under assessment. The empirical outcomes of the study present that all selected markets have responded to their own lag of conditional volatility along with news shocks. The impact of conditional variance is higher in comparison to shocks which is an indication that markets fundamentals are stronger than corrections or shocks. The results of cross country spillover show that volatility of Shanghai Stock Exchange of China and shocks from Japan and Hongkong markets assert a significant effect over volatility of Indian equity market. Volatility of stock markets of Japan and China is not affected by the cross market volatility and shocks spillover from India. In contrast, volatility of Hongkong market is affected by shocks and volatility of Indian equity markets. Findings of the research have meaningful insights for the Governments and regulators, academicians, researchers, investors and fund managers in framing investment strategies in the chosen markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the characteristics and evolution over the last ten years of the commodities trade specialization of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS). Unlike earlier studies, this work offers an evolutionary and comprehensive assessment of the trade challenges posed by CIBS to the global trading system. To this end, we adopt the notion of “trade specialization cluster,” i.e., a group of countries sharing a common trade specialization at a level higher than experienced in countries outside the group. Clusters are drawn by using the crisp cluster technique. Our findings contribute to partial mitigation of the pessimistic view which looks at CIBS as a source of threat to the developed world—with the relevant exception of China—while highlighting a competitiveness threat for developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]