The worst is over, or at least that’s what many Asia Business Council members think about economic prospects for the next year. By Asia Business Council Executive Director Mark Clifford.

The Asia Business Council annual survey of members found business optimism for the year ahead has plunged to the lowest level since the global financial crisis in 2008. The overwhelming reason cited was the U.S.-China trade conflict. Other reasons included concerns about a trade war-induced recession, Japan-South Korea trade disputes, and the impact of Persian …

Typhoons, terrorism, the threat of war, tsunamis, earthquakes, and epidemic disease. These are but a few of the challenges Asian companies have confronted since the century began. Risk is not new. What’s new is that ever-more-complex business models make companies vulnerable to risk as never before. What’s new, too, is that we are running up …

It is a truism that thriving financial markets need free flow of information. Can Hong Kong prove this truism wrong? By Asia Business Council Executive Director Mark Clifford.

Look for more geopolitical tensions and new technologies to continue a period of great disruption in supply chains, business models, and consumer behavior. By Asia Business Council Executive Director Mark Clifford.

It is unfortunate that North Korea plays with foreign relations–and Korean lives–as if it were just another mass-game spectacle. By Asia Business Council Executive Director Mark Clifford.

David Webb believes in freedom–free markets and free people. He has been an unusually effective fighter for both kinds of freedom in three decades in Hong Kong. By Asia Business Council Executive Director Mark Clifford.

The panic is past. But the pandemic is still with us. Businesses are preparing for a world in which the Covid-19 virus and other pandemic diseases are a recurring feature. What will this new landscape look like? By Asia Business Council Executive Director Mark Clifford.

The relatively low infection and death rates in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are a testament to investment in public health infrastructure, transparency and societies that prioritize group interests. By Executive Director Mark Clifford.

Lessons that should have been learned after the harrowing Sars experience were not: diseases like Covid-19 will happen from time to time in a hyper-connected world, and the trust and transparency that will fortify a society’s response to such a crisis is lacking. By Executive Director Mark Clifford.