ASEAN’s Canada Pivot: Inside the Push to Conclude ACAFTA ASEAN is edging closer to a trade deal that would give the bloc its first comprehensive free trade agreement with a G7 economy outside its existing Asia-Pacific network. At the 48th ASEAN Summit, held in Cebu, the Philippines, in May 2026 under the chairmanship theme “Navigating…

Singapore’s Retrenchment Benefit Gap Exposed: Denso Ruling Strikes Out 19-Year Worker’s Claim A Singapore High Court ruling handed down in May 2026 has laid bare a gap between the tripartite labour norms Singapore promotes as central to its employment model and the narrower set of rights that are actually enforceable in the civil courts. That…

Malaysia’s Carbon Tax Arrives — A Test Case for ASEAN Pricing Malaysia is about to become one of the first Southeast Asian economies with a domestic carbon tax, a move the rest of ASEAN will be watching closely as the region works out how to respond to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The…

Hong Kong’s First Regulated Stablecoins Go Live Hong Kong is on track for its first regulated, fiat-backed stablecoins to enter circulation in the second half of 2026. That puts the territory on a genuinely different regulatory path from its neighbours, at a time when Asian jurisdictions are taking very different views on how much room…

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…