Recently I've been doing a bit of reading around the financial situation in Malaysia. It's an interesting country for many reasons. Geographically you could say that it sits in the heart of Asia Pacific, on the South China Sea close to Singapore and just south of the rapidly growing economy of Vietnam. Its population is growing and is has a Muslim majority, which has some interesting implications for the development of Islamic finance.

In the short-term, however, there are certa...

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I recently wrote a feature for the 2013 Asia Supplement published by Global Trade Review (GTR), with a specific focus on Japan. The country's manufacturers were particularly hard hit by the huge natural disasters that have hit both Japan and its neighbours in the past few years. In response to the intense pressure on the supply chain caused by such events, Japanese companies have gone out of their way to diversify their supply chain within Asia by setting up bases in a variety of Asian countr...
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