China, India and Japan are leading a surge in military spending in the Asian region with geopolitical tensions pushing South Korea, Australia and Taiwan, among others, to follow suit. China’s military spending now exceeds the …
Articles by: "David Uren"
China’s campaign of economic coercion against Australia failed because of support from other Asian trading partners who turned to Australia to secure their energy supplies. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and India—Australia’s second, third, fourth and fifth …
The upper estimate of $368 billion for Australia’s acquisition of eight nuclear-powered submarines is an impossibly large number. Stacked in $100 bills, each 0.14 millimetre thick, the pile would rise to about 500 kilometres. You …
Australia is assured of rapid growth in exports of the key minerals needed to make modern batteries, but the government’s plan to move into battery manufacturing will require aspiring businesses to overcome the related hurdles …
Australia’s ability to make meaningful inroads into the downstream processing and manufacturing of critical minerals is hobbled by the downsizing of the country’s established metals processing industry over the past two decades. The closure of …
The United States was sharply critical of Germany’s energy dependence on Russia, imposing sanctions on the construction of pipelines carrying Russian gas beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany (if not, as a now-refuted report by …
It’s too soon to declare an end to China’s economic war against Australia, but the signs are all pointing in that direction, with the meeting between trade ministers of the two countries this week coinciding …
Fewer than one in 10 Western multinationals with subsidiaries in Russia has quit any of them in the year since the Ukraine invasion began. This finding by two highly regarded academics, Simon Evenett from University of St …
The world has witnessed the outbreak of economic warfare this year, quite unlike anything seen since the end of World War II. The machinery of economic sanctions, which has been honed over decades against minor …
The World Trade Organization last week ruled that Indonesia had no right to ban the export of nickel or to require that raw nickel ore be refined in Indonesia. Handing a comprehensive victory to the …
The Ukraine conflict is exposing the massive costs that accompany a relatively small and contained war—one in which the military action is entirely confined to one of the poorest nations in Europe. Although Ukraine has …
The past decade of work proving up Australia’s deposits of rare-earth minerals is beginning to pay off, with a number of firms getting close to production. But the supply chains for rare earths still run …