ASEAN Sets Its Sights on Antitrust: The 2026–2030 Competition Roadmap Amid the headline trade and geopolitical announcements from the 48th ASEAN Summit, a quieter initiative emerged that could matter more over time: a new Roadmap on Competition and Consumer Protection covering 2026 to 2030, aimed at building real cross-border coordination among the bloc’s ten national…

Indonesia’s Disinformation Bill Tests the Line Between Sovereignty and Speech Indonesia is advancing legislation aimed at countering what officials call foreign-driven disinformation, joining a growing list of Southeast Asian jurisdictions tightening legal control over online content, with implications that go well past domestic politics. The bill, which has moved through the legislative process in 2026,…

Japan Draws the Line on Taiwan — and Pulls the Philippines Closer A diplomatic rupture between Japan and China that started with an off-the-cuff remark last November has, by mid-2026, settled into a steady pattern of maritime pressure and defence realignment across Northeast and Southeast Asia. The friction goes back to comments by Japanese Prime…

Washington Cuts India’s Tariff to 10% — Reshuffling Asia’s Export Pecking Order A fast-moving sequence of US trade rulings has left India’s tariff position with Washington genuinely unsettled, with real consequences for how global buyers split sourcing across Asia’s competing manufacturing hubs. Under a US-India interim trade agreement announced in February 2026, India’s reciprocal tariff…

In June 2025, on a state visit to Tanzania, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam announced that Singapore would open negotiations on a free trade agreement with the eight-nation East African Community. On paper the match looks lopsided. A city-state of about six million people is sitting down with a bloc whose combined GDP, north of US$350 billion,…

Every cross-border transaction rests on a deceptively hard question: is the business on the other side who it claims to be? Today the answer comes from fragmented national registries, repeated know-your-business (KYB) checks, and a great deal of manual paperwork. Three initiatives now converging — ASEAN’s UBIN, the UN’s GRID, and the global Legal Entity…

The Asian Development Bank and UN ESCAP launched the Asia-Pacific Trade Facilitation Report 2026: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence in Trade Facilitation in Bangkok on 9 June 2026. Its message is more cautious than the title implies. AI is already changing how goods clear the region’s borders, but adoption is early, very uneven, and held back far…

Singapore Declares a Year of Climate Adaptation — What That Means in Practice Singapore sits barely above sea level on a tropical island, which gives its government a different relationship with climate change than most. This is not a policy debate — it is an engineering problem the city has been managing for decades. In…

Singapore Sets the Rules for GenAI and Personal Data — And Asks for Your View Two days ago, Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission published proposed guidelines that any business building or deploying generative AI in Singapore should read carefully. The Proposed Advisory Guidelines on the Use of Personal Data in Generative AI, released on 2…

Singapore Bets Big on AI: Kampong AI and the Push to Be the Region’s Hub Singapore is making its biggest bet on artificial intelligence yet, and Budget 2026 spells out what that looks like in practice. The centrepiece is Kampong AI, a dedicated AI park at One-North, Singapore’s existing innovation district. The name — a…