As the marginal returns of traditional growth drivers decline, breakthroughs in technology to push the productivity frontier, reforms to reconstruct incentive-compatible mechanisms, and culture to activate social capital will become key to overcoming the middle-income trap. Historical experience shows that any single dimension of growth faces a cei

Between 2000 and 2024, China continued to rely on investment-driven growth in the face of external shocks, but this approach to regulation often came with side effects such as overcapacity and mounting debt. The root cause of this lies in the lack of deep consideration for reform to optimize investment efficiency. If policy returns are solely focus

Introducing the concept of heterarchy into the study of societies has helped to understand puzzling activities and structures that are found in the past and the present. It is not necessarily a replacement model so much as a complementary one; studying the interplay between the two systems can be particularly instructive. First, the hierarchy-heter

In May, Universiti Teknologi MARA — a university historically reserved for ethnic Malays and other bumiputera — proposed temporarily admitting students from other ethnic backgrounds to its postgraduate cardiothoracic programme to address a critical shortage of qualified surgeons. The backlash was swift, with students and Malay nationalist group

On his first day in office, United States (US) President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw his country from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement. This latest plunge of the US climate change rollercoaster may be the most impactful yet. The Paris Agreement was initially met with resistance from th