Sales of new private homes fell in June amid lack of major launches, say analysts

SINGAPORE: Sales of new private homes in Singapore fell in June, the first dip after five straight months of increases in 2023.

Excluding executive condominiums, developers sold 278 units in June, a 73.2 per cent drop from the 1,039 units sold in May, according to data released by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on Monday (Jul 17).

On a year-on-year basis, private home sales fell by 43 per cent from the 488 units sold in June 2022.

The number of units launched for sale also saw a significant decline, with the 31 units launched in June 98.1 per cent lower than the 1,595 units in May, and 92.2 per cent lower than the 397 units in June 2022.

Analysts said the decrease in private home sales was due to a lack of major project launches in June, with the 17-unit Lavender Residence being the only project launched that month.

“The substantial decline in sales volume can be attributed to a high base effect, where two major project launches (The Reserve Residences and The Continuum) drove May 2023 sales to a 12-month high,” said Lam Chern Woon, Edmund Tie’s head of research and consulting.

ERA Realty Network’s key executive officer Eugene Lim cited the June school holidays, with many Singaporeans away on vacation, for developers to avoid launching any new projects.

CBRE’s Southeast Asia head of research Tricia Song said June’s sales figure, which is the lowest since the 170 units sold in December 2022, reflect “cautious buying sentiment amidst weak economic conditions”.

She noted that the 3,463 new private homes sold in the first half of 2023 is 18 per cent lower compared to the 4,222 units sold in the first half of 2022.

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Australia baffled as unidentified mystery object washes up on beach

A large unidentified object that washed up on an Australian beach on July 16, 2023Reuters

Police have been baffled by a mysterious “unidentified” dome that washed up on a West Australian beach.

The giant metal object was found by locals at Green Head beach, about 250km (155 miles) north of Perth.

State and federal authorities are investigating the item, which is not currently believed to be from a commercial aircraft.

It is being treated as hazardous, and police have requested people keep a safe distance.

“We want to reassure the community that we are actively engaged in a collaborative effort with various State and Federal agencies to determine the object’s origin and nature,” police said in a statement.

Green Head beach residents said the cylinder was about 2.5m wide and between 2.5m and 3m long, Australia’s public broadcaster reported.

Residents visited the site on Saturday night to see the cylinder, the ABC reported, with one local describing it as a “great social evening”.

“It was a lovely, still night, the kids were digging sand castles around it,” he told the ABC.

Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas said the item was possibly a fuel tank from a rocket that had fallen into the Indian Ocean at some stage in the past 12 months.

The Australian space agency said it was possible the giant cylinder could have fallen from a “foreign space launch vehicle” and it would liaise with other international agencies.

While there was some speculation the cylinder may have been a part of MH370 – a plane that went missing off the west Australian coast in 2014 with 239 passengers on board – Mr Thomas said there was “no chance”.

“It’s not any part of a Boeing 777 and the fact is MH370 was lost nine and a half years ago so it would show a great deal more wear and tear on the debris,” he said.

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2023: The year of Singapore’s sprint queen Shanti Pereira so far

FLYING START TO 2023

Pereira rewrote her own 100m national record in her first race of the year at the New Zealand Track and Field Championships in Wellington in March.

She did it without having raced in a competitive meet since the 2022 Commonwealth Games in August. 

Her time of 11.46s in her heat eclipsed her previous national mark by 0.02s.

Speaking to CNA at the time, Pereira described the achievement as a “very pleasant surprise”.

“I wanted to go out strong and just focus on the technical aspects of it.”

BREAKS NATIONAL RECORD THRICE IN THREE DAYS

At the Australia Open Track and Field Championships in Brisbane, Pereira broke her national records thrice in three days.

She first clocked a time of 11.38s to win her 100m heat on Mar 31 to eclipse her own national mark by 0.08s, then won the final a day later, going 0.01s even faster. 

The next day, she set her third national record in as many days when she timed 22.89s in the women’s 200m heat.

In doing so, she smashed her own mark of 23.16s set at the Brisbane Track Classic about a week ago.

But she pulled out of the 200m final later, with her coach Luis Cunha explaining that this was to avoid overstretching her both physically and mentally.

“This has been mentally very tiring (for her) … Every time she ran in the past three weeks, it was equalling the national record or a national record. You have no idea how stressful this can be,” he told CNA at the time.

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‘President Prabowo’ starting to resonate in Indonesia

JAKARTA – President Prabowo Subianto? It has a ring to it these days and the sound is only getting louder as the defense minister and Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) chairman maintains his lead in the polls seven months out from next year’s February 14 presidential election.

For most analysts, that’s because rival Indonesian Democrat Party for Struggle (PDI-P) candidate Ganjar Pranowo is struggling to gain traction in the shadow of overbearing matriarch Megawati Sukarnoputri and a family legacy she is determined to protect and preserve.

Aides say it is Megawati who will decide the Central Java governor’s running mate while acknowledging Pranowo might be consulted. It is rumored she will also select his Cabinet. Certainly, she promises to be omnipresent in any Pranowo administration. 

Many of Indonesia’s 192.8 million voters may already be asking themselves whether they will be getting Pranowo or Megawati, judging by the way he shelters behind the façade he has built around himself as a social media star.

So far, at least, he has failed to assert himself as a leader in his own right. Still bowing to authority figures and with little of substance to show for his decade-long governorship, he has only said he is committed to following in President Joko Widodo’s policy footsteps.

Shining isn’t encouraged in PDI-P with Megawati and her daughter, Parliament Speaker Puan Maharani, at the helm. One legislator who quit the party says she couldn’t do the job she was elected to do because she had to stay below the radar.  

Prabowo, for his part, is sitting back and enjoying the ride, happy in his role as defense minister and seemingly comfortable in the knowledge that if the hugely popular Widodo is not openly supporting him, he is not opposing him either, despite being a nominal PDI-P member. 

Several groups of volunteers who played a key role in Widodo’s two election victories are openly backing Prabowo. Among them is a group led by Gibran Rukabuming, 35, the president’s eldest son and the mayor of Solo in Central Java.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (R) shakes hands with Chairman of Gerindra Party Prabowo Subianto after Jokowi was sworn in for a second term as president at the parliament building in Jakarta on October 20, 2019. Photo: Asia Times Files / Pool / AFP / Achmad Ibrahim

All this explains why the Golkar and National Mandate (PAN) parties are gravitating toward Gerindra and its coalition partner, the National Awakening Party (PKB), leaving PDI-P with only the tiny United Development Party (PPP) for company.

With PDI-P holding 128 seats in the House of Representatives, it doesn’t require a partner to clear the 20% threshold needed to nominate a presidential candidate. But that may be cold comfort.

A recent survey by Kompas, Indonesia’s leading newspaper, had Prabowo at 24.5%, ahead of Pranowo on 22.8% and opposition candidate Anies Baswedan adrift on 13.6% and struggling to make headway in what is firming as a three-horse race.

A subsequent survey by Indikator Politik, considered one of the country’s more reliable pollsters, also had Prabowo in the lead at 38%, with Pranowo on 34% and Baswedan on 19% – another indication of the minister’s staying power.

If Pranowo does lose to Prabowo, analysts foresee a rising tide of resistance to Megawati’s leadership from the ruling party’s younger cadre, giving Widodo a possible opening to a job that would extend his influence long after he steps down in October next year. 

Megawati’s recent effort to mend fences with former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his Democrat Party – a surprise move she notably left to her underlings to manage – showed she is already looking beyond the first round of voting.

Supporters of Baswedan’s coalition, comprising the Democrats, the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) and the National Democrat Party (Nasdem), would likely become a factor in a second-round showdown between Prabowo and Pranowo.

It is generally accepted that the Islamic conservatives who support PKS and represent a consistent 12-13% of the Indonesian electorate – grouped mostly in heavily populated West Java – will never vote for PDI-P, sitting as it is on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

Historians looking back on this period will marvel at how the influence of Megawati’s father, founding president Sukarno – and five words in the preamble to the 1945 Constitution –  may have been a turning point in the race.

The leader of the Indonesia Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) Megawati Sukarnoputri looks at a booth displaying memorabilia on the sidelines of the 4th PDIP congress at the Inna Grand Bali Beach hotel on the resort island of Bali April 10, 2015 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. REUTERS/Antara Foto/Andika Wahyu ???ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. IT IS DISTRIBUTED, EXACTLY AS RECEIVED BY REUTERS, AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS. MANDATORY CREDIT. INDONESIA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN INDONESIA.? - RTR4WS5T
Indonesia Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) founder Megawati Sukarnoputri. Photo: Asia Times Files / Antara Foto / Andika Wahyu

That singular phrase, “all colonialism must be abolished,” served to justify Megawati’s opposition to Israel participating in last May’s FIFA Under-20 football tournament and the association’s subsequent action in canceling the event.

A former Dutch colony which won its independence following World War II, Indonesia’s foreign policy is dominated by one single, unsolvable issue – ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine. This is the first time it has been applied to sport, however.

“This is not an Islamic issue, it is a nationalist issue,” says one foreign policy expert, explaining why Indonesia’s Muslim majority did not join the move to exclude Israel. In fact, they have said very little.

Neither did Prabowo, adhering to his strategy of staying away from controversy. Even his one real lapse, a strangely conceived plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Moscow’s terms, did nothing to dent his popularity at home.

More than disappointing millions of football-mad Indonesians, Pranowo’s outspoken support for PDI-P’s stand – at Megawati’s clear behest – painted him as a timorous functionary who will unquestioningly do her bidding.

That stands in strong contrast to Widodo. He has consistently refused to accept a situation where, as a two-term president, he is expected to be subservient to a self-entitled party leader who has never won an election.

When Prabowo declared his candidacy last year, analysts thought his age – now 71 – and two previous losses to Widodo in 2014 and 2019 would be major drawbacks against a charismatic 54-year-old rival who represents a generational break with the past.

Instead, Prabowo has prospered, mostly due to PDI-P’s strategic miscalculations, which have dispelled all lingering talk of Prabowo signing on as Pranowo’s vice-presidential candidate in what would be an unbeatable ticket.

Indeed, the fact that Megawati was compelled to nominate Pranowo before she was ready, clearly to limit the fallout from the football fracas, reveals just how out of touch she is with public opinion.

It also shows where her priorities lie: maintaining her iron grip on PDI-P and keeping alive the name of her father, who died 53 years ago before two-thirds of Indonesia’s population was born.

While Prabowo acts cautiously, he has said enough to suggest he believes Indonesia needs another round of political reform after a decade of democratic neglect at the hands of the Jakarta elite. 

In one interview he noted “the cost of doing politics is too expensive and is incentivizing corruption,” asserting that “our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could ruin it.”

He went on to call for political parties, social organizations and religious leaders to join together to fix the system, using a similar body to that formed in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to prepare Indonesia for independence.

Pranowo isn’t alone in promising to continue what Widodo has started, including his controversial US$33 billion plan to move the national capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan, a project that has barely broken ground.

Ganjar Pranowo will carry the ruling PDI-P’s banner at next year’s presidential election. Image: Twitter

Prabowo’s brother, businessman Hashim Djojohadikusumo, recently pledged to follow “99.99%” of Widodo’s programs, the strongest commitment the Prabowo camp has made so far to secure the president’s endorsement.

On the surface at least, today’s Prabowo is a very different version from the bellicose general accused of human rights abuses during the reign of Suharto, his then father-in-law, and his alleged attempt to take power when Suharto resigned in 1998.   

His weaknesses often shine through, however. Friends say he still allows his explosive temper to get the better of him in private and the off-the-cuff speech he made at the Shangri-La Dialogue underscores a penchant for doing his own thing.

Insiders say Prabowo did have a prepared speech he had worked on with a team of advisers, addressing the issues of Myanmar and the South China Sea, that had been cleared with the Foreign Ministry beforehand.

Instead, he scrapped it at the last minute and wrote his own 18-minute speech, widely seen as an effort to raise his domestic stature as an international statesman, rather than any serious proposal to end a conflict on the other side of the world.

Baswedan has also been calling for a political transformation, naming his team as the Coalition of Change. But that worries Indonesians still suspicious of the former education minister’s ties to the Sharia-based PKS, even if it has lately taken a more centrist stance.  

Analysts point to a recent op-ed in Kompas that set out the opposition’s mission statement by rejecting “blind obedience” toward any national leader and advocating for a strengthening of democracy and policies promoting economic equality.

These goals are perceived to be implicit criticisms of Widodo, who critics complain has presided over years of democratic decline while pursuing a single-minded search for foreign investment and building infrastructure projects that arguably have done little to help the poor.

Certainly, it belies the fact that Widodo remains Indonesia’s most popular-ever president, winning an extraordinary 82% approval rating in the latest survey carried out by the Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) last April.

Clearly, many voters don’t agree with Baswedan’s assessment and are prepared to support Widodo until the last day of his eventful presidency. That alone puts a value on his endorsement which may be difficult to measure but simply can’t be ignored ahead of next year’s presidential poll.

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Government to deal rigorously with cluster of ‘high-profile issues’, says PM Lee

SINGAPORE: The People’s Action Party (PAP) will “put things right” and deal with the recent scandals surrounding its Members of Parliament rigorously and transparently, said Mr Lee Hsien Loong on Monday (Jul 17).

He was responding to a question from the media on public perception that there has been a “slip in PAP standards” due to some incidents involving PAP MPs over the past few months.

Mr Lee also said that he has no plans to call an early election.

At the press conference, which had been called to address the resignations of Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan-Jin and Tampines MP Cheng Li Hui, Mr Lee said that Mr Tan and Ms Cheng had been in an “inappropriate relationship”. Mr Tan had also been embroiled in a controversy after he was caught making disparaging remarks about Workers’ Party MP Jamus Lim on a parliament hot mic.

In addition, it emerged last week that Transport Minister S Iswaran was involved in a Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) investigation.

Before that, Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam and Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan had to explain in parliament the reasons for their rental of state properties in the exclusive Ridout Road area, and whether there had been any conflict of interest. In this instance, the CPIB and Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean cleared both ministers of any impropriety.

“I think from time to time, these things happen. When they happen, we have to make sure we deal with them and deal with them rigorously as well as transparently, and everybody can see that we are doing that,” said Mr Lee on Monday.

“No system can be completely infallible. You appoint people, sometimes things go wrong, you have to find out and you have to put it right.”

Mr Lee said that in the Ridout Road case, the ministers went through a rigorous and full CPIB investigation, as well as a separate probe by Mr Teo, with the results and the reports presented fully in parliament.

In Mr Iswaran’s case, the matter arose because CPIB came across the issue while doing another investigation, and the anti-graft agency had informed Mr Lee. A few months later, CPIB came back to Mr Lee to report that it wanted to open a formal investigation, and he told them to proceed.

“That is what they have done, and it will go through to its full conclusion,” said Mr Lee. “In the case of Tan Chuan-Jin and Cheng Li Hui, they did not live up to the standards which were expected. We tried to get them to mend their ways, it did not work, and they had to go.”

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Italy in an unspoken Indo-Pacific pivot

While Italy’s traditional geostrategic area of reference is the “enlarged Mediterranean“, the growing importance of the Indo-Pacific from an economic and geopolitical standpoint has piqued Rome’s interest. Italy does not yet possess an articulated Indo-Pacific strategy.

But a document released by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 2022 underscores how Rome’s involvement in the Indo-Pacific theater is already longstanding. Present and future initiatives are meant to be multilateral, inclusive and substantially in line with the European Union’s strategic priorities.

key interest of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government is signaling the importance of upholding the rules-based order in the region. Rome’s strategic outreach in the Indo-Pacific is primarily addressed towards substantial regional players.

Meloni’s visit to India in March 2023 was instrumental in relaunching defense talks, and diplomatic efforts with Japan have elevated Japan-Italy relations to the level of a “strategic partnership” since January 2023.

While often under the media’s radar, Italian foreign policy has also already designated Southeast Asia as a significant zone of interest, in terms of both the concerns of individual states and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

A top priority has been the expansion of trade and economic interconnections. In line with this, since 2017, the annual High-Level Dialogue on ASEAN-Italy Economic Relations has grouped together political and business leaders to discuss possible avenues to increase the volume of exchanges in what is framed as a “strategic market” for Italian enterprises.

In parallel, Italy has been particularly keen to gear up its security role, especially in the maritime domain.

Between May and June 2023, the Morosini carried out different activities in Southeast Asia, paying visits to ports like Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok, participating in defense exhibitions in Malaysia and Singapore and notably taking part for the first time in the Indonesia-led multinational search and rescue “Komodo-23” exercise.

Indonesian Defense Minister and his Italian counterpart Guido Crosetto are keen to cooperate. Photo: Italian Defense Ministry

Defense relations with Jakarta are especially on the rise. The Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto visited the country in December 2022 to boost defense and industrial cooperation.

The visit can also be read through the lens of the 2021 deal between Italian shipbuilding company Fincantieri and the Indonesian Navy for the acquisition of eight frigates, which represents an important milestone in the ongoing modernization of the Indonesian armed forces.

Another key regional partner is Vietnam. In 2013, Rome and Hanoi decided to upgrade their relationship to the level of a strategic partnership. Under this framework, the two nations have been conducting a dialogue on defense-related issues.

Italy has also been a frontrunner in forging ties with different regional organizations in the Indo-Pacific, such as the Pacific Islands Forum, the Indian Ocean Rim Association and ASEAN. The attention of Italian business and diplomatic communities towards ASEAN has manifested through the intensification of institutional meetings involving the two sides.

In September 2020, ASEAN Foreign Ministers decided to confer to Italy the status of Development Partner, in a move that further deepened and institutionalized cooperation in sectors such as cybersecurity, maritime development and anti-piracy.

Southeast Asia represents one of the focus sub-regions in the context of Italy’s nascent ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. But there are important open-ended issues to reflect upon.

One relates to how long term this activism will be. While Meloni’s Italian government has put the Indo-Pacific and Southeast Asia on its geopolitical map, in the medium to long term there is the risk that, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, Italy may eventually reshift its attention and resources closer to Italy’s core strategic perimeter.

There is also the question of Italy’s relationship with China. The Italian government has yet to make a final decision about the renewal of a Belt and Road Initiative-related memorandum signed in 2019.

While some underline that Italy has gradually distanced itself from China and will likely decide not to extend the agreement, Meloni has highlighted that Rome could potentially stay on good terms with China even outside the Belt and Road Initiative framework.

Meloni’s ‘pivot to Asia’ may not last under different leadership. Image: Twitter

Yet, recent declarations by the Chinese ambassador to Italy hint that an abandonment of the memorandum would inevitably have an impact on the relationship.

This begs the question of how Italy will position itself if China increases its assertiveness in the South China Sea. How concretely Italy would respond to a contingency in the area is not easy to predict.

The articulation of an official Indo-Pacific strategy is then a fundamental step forward for Italy in order to answer strategic questions, keep building on a quite successful record and clearly delineate its priorities and goals for future engagement with Southeast Asia.

Fabio Figiaconi is PhD candidate in the Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.

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China’s GDP data point to need for stimulus, but will it come?

China published its second-quarter GDP data on Monday with a big – but disappointing – number, 6.3% growth year on year. The reason for the disappointment comes from the  hugely positive base effect, as last year’s second-quarter GDP growth was virtually because of the severe lockdowns happening in Shanghai and elsewhere in the country. 

The underwhelming growth in the second quarter is not all about the lack of external demand. Although exports have clearly been hit in June, they  had remained rather resilient in April and May. If anything, external demand will become much more of a problem in the second half of 2023 based on June’s data.

The main reason for the poor second quarter, though, is lackluster domestic demand. This is particularly the case for fixed-asset investment, dragged down by the real-estate sector, but also consumption. In fact, retail sales grew even less in June than in March, and consumption propensity remains lower than before the pandemic started.

Given the above, the 5% GDP growth target the Chinese government set for 2023 during the Two Sessions in March will be hard to achieve without stimulus.

This is ironic, since 5% was generally considered too low a target for an economy that was reopening after three years of zero-Covid policies, but China’s new premier, Li Qiang, was already warning during his press conference in March that the 2023 GDP growth target would be hard to achieve, and so it has been.

Against this backdrop, the People’s Bank of China continued to ease monetary conditions in the second quarter, but there has not been any visible impact in terms of credit growth. In other words, the recent cuts in interest rates have not led to an increase in consumption or investment thanks to cheaper borrowing as the borrowing itself keeps decelerating. 

Based on Japan’s experience in the 1990s, there is the risk that China is entering a liquidity trap due to the risks of balance-sheet recession. In other words, there is a risk that Chinese corporates and households, pushed by their very negative sentiment about the economic outlook, prefer to disinvest and deleverage in the light of falling revenue generation.

In the case of corporates, this process seems to have started, as profits have fallen substantially in 2023 and Chinese corporates have started deleveraging, especially private ones, and begun to reduce investment. 

For households, the growth of disposable income remains stagnant and youth unemployment reached record highs in June at more than 21%.

Why no stimulus?

If monetary policy is not so effective at the current juncture, the question is why a fiscal stimulus – a frequently used policy tool in China  – has not yet been put on the table as the easiest solution to China’s economic woes.

Rumors of an imminent fiscal stimulus have been in the market since mid-June, but nothing official has been announced yet. More specifically, such rumors included an 1-trillion-yuan package of special bonds to be issued by local governments mainly geared toward infrastructure projects and with the ultimate objective of lifting confidence.

While clearly needed for the now financially weak infrastructure sector, it is not really obvious whether yet one more infra-led package would do the trick of convincing investors that the Chinese economy will return to a faster growth path.

In any event, no such stimulus has been announced, which seems to indicate that Chinese policymakers are still wary about a too rapid increase in public debt, which already hovers around 100% when local governments’ off-balance-sheet debt is also taken into account, in  other words the borrowing conducted by local government financial vehicles (LGFVs).

The policy response, so far, seems to lean on easing the regulatory constraints that key sectors of the economy have suffered from in the last few years.

First and foremost, the three red lines that constrained the leverage of real-estate developers were quietly lifted and substituted by 16 easing measures introduced in November 2022. Those 16 measures have now been renewed, which, however, does not necessarily equate to an improvement in sentiment, as investors can see that their impact so far has been muted.

In the same vein, the tech sector briefly felt some relief from the settlement of the open case with Ant Financial through the equivalent of a US$1 billion fine. 

The reality is that investors are still wary about the Chinese economy, all the more after the publication of the second-quarter GDP data, and will find it hard to turn their sentiment to a more positive one only by regulatory measures.

The question, then, is whether these poor GDP data will move policymakers toward introducing a big stimulus, not only to be sure that the 5% growth target is reached in 2023 but also to avoid a very rapid deceleration in growth in 2024 once the base effects from the terrible 2022 data are no longer positive.   

Two considerations seem warranted when assessing such a possibility. The first is that Premier Li Qiang has been rather silent regarding policy announcements since he took office in March, beyond general statements on how the private sector, as well as foreign investors, should seek opportunities in the Chinese economy.

His behavior needs to be understood  in the context of the perceived subdued importance of economic growth in China’s policymaking today as opposed to national-security issues.

Against such a backdrop, a large economic stimulus could be hard to justify, all the more so since President Xi Jinping has long been critical of the 2008 massive stimulus introduced by his predecessors.

The second consideration points to the reduced effectiveness of one more fiscal stimulus, certainly when compared with 2008. Given China’s rapidly decreasing return on assets, an infrastructure-led fiscal stimulus would need to be much bigger to have the same economic impact.

This also implies that, with such a fiscal stimulus, public debt in China would jump well above the current 100% of GDP, which would place the economy among the most indebted in the world. 

Alicia Garcia Herrero is chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis and senior research fellow at Bruegel. Follow her on Twitter @Aligarciaherrer.

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South Korea floods: Tunnel horror strikes fear of monsoon

A group of soldiers enter a flooded underground tunnel in the town of Osong, North Chungcheong Province, central South Korea, on 17 July 2023, to join the search operation for missing people who are believed to have been submerged inside the tunnel after a nearby river overflowed due to heavy rain on 15 July.EPA

As hundreds of rescue workers comb the muddied waters of a South Korean underpass, the stagnant rainwater, once up to the ceiling, now only covers their knees.

They will not give up. There is one person still missing.

It’s been more than 48 hours since extreme rainfall caused a riverbank to break, and water suddenly and forcefully filled the major underpass, stopping vehicles dead.

Thirteen bodies have so far been brought out of the tunnel in the central, mountainous region of Chongju. Rescuers have CCTV footage of the terrified missing driver trying to escape their submerged car, but no sign of their body yet.

As they search on, another car is winched out, its back window smashed out by the force of the water.

This scene, akin to one from a horror film, is a wake up call for South Korea. Climate change is starting to take its toll on this country, that until now has been spared some of the extreme weather events experienced by other, hotter countries.

But only halfway through its monsoon season, and it has already received more than the total amount of rainfall typical for the period.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has said he will “completely overhaul” the country’s approach to extreme weather, as “these events will become more commonplace”.

“We must accept climate change is happening, and deal with it,” Mr Yoon said.

An hour away, in the tiny farming village of Eham, 87-year-old Song Du-ho sits on his doorstep with his eyes closed as he tries to process the damage that surrounds him.

Inside his modest one-story home, the floors have been ripped up and his waterlogged belongings are stacked up to the ceiling.

Much of what he owns now litters his garden including broken bookcases and electrical appliances. Two soldiers are breaking them down into pieces so they can dispose of them using a wheelbarrow.

Mr Song jumps up. “Hey! Don’t throw away the metal, I’m going to sell the metal, throw away the rest”, he shouts at them.

The rice and bean farmer’s home was flooded after Saturday’s torrential rain overwhelmed the dam that normally protects his rural village in North Chungcheong province, in South Korea.

The water was up to his waist by the time rescue workers came for him in the middle of the night, along with his wife, who struggles with a bad back.

“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared when the water was coming in. I could have died”, he says.

Mr Song is dazed. He’s lived in Eham for 40 years, and says he is well acclimatised to South Korea’s monsoon season, which runs from the end of June to the beginning of August.

But he says he has never experienced rain like that which fell this weekend, causing river to swells and land to slide down the dense mountainous terrain, burying homes and killing dozens.

Mr Song knows it will take an awful lot of work to fix his place up, and it is probably beyond his capabilities.

“I’m almost 90”, he says in despair. “What am I to do, where am I to go? We older people die where we live”.

Next door, 74-year old Han Chang Rae is squatting in the middle of her mud filled courtyard, dumping the contents of her now defunct fridge into bin bags. Even the mounds of kimchi and other pickled vegetables cannot be saved on this baking, humid day.

Her floral visor prevents the sweat from dripping down her face, as she motors around, barely taking the time to look up. “I have so much to do”, she anguishes.

In contrast to Mr Song, Ms Han only moved in 15 days ago, and is now binning belongings that never made it out of the box.

She too is bewildered. “I’m 74 and have never experienced this kind of disaster”, she says.

“I don’t know what to feel, I feel nothing, I’m just lucky I didn’t die”.

South Koreans are less used to dealing with the effects of the warming planet, and with more extreme rainfall forecast for Tuesday, danger still looms.

For those in the farming village of Edam, the monsoon season is now no longer a routine part of summer, but something to fear.

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