President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union message (delivered before Congress on January 20) that US economic sanctions have had a devastating impact on the Russian economy (Tvrain.ru, January 21). In reality, only certain parts of the economy of Russia have been... MORE

Since 2009, the Chinese government, in cooperation with state-run and private firms, has conducted an import substitution campaign in its computer server market, which is currently dominated by U.S. information technology (IT) companies IBM, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard (HP). China’s policy objective has been to reduce... MORE

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s new round of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and his anti-corruption campaign will dramatically change the preferences and performance of SOEs’ overseas economic expansion. The economic and political initiatives undertaken by Xi meet in the state sector, as the Chinese government is... MORE

The United States’ muted profile in mineral-rich, landlocked Mongolia receded even more in 2014. Indeed, the US has largely stood by while Mongolia deliberately integrated its faltering economy closer with its two neighbors, China and Russia. Last year, top-level Mongolian officials met with Chinese President... MORE

The unrest and ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine seriously impacts coal supplies and thermal power electricity generation in the rest of the country. On December 28, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko ordered the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry to halt rolling power blackouts, adding that... MORE

In December 2014, Russian legislators quietly passed new legislation that allows Moscow to remove part of the region from under the control of that region’s government in order “to speed up socio-economic development” in the North Caucasus republics. As a Dagestani analyst Rasul Kadiev points... MORE

Late in 2014, Russian state oil company Rosneft acquired 49 percent of the Georgian company Petrocas Energy Group, which owns a strategically important oil terminal at the port of Poti and Georgia’s most extensive network of gas stations, branded as Gulf (Rosneft.com, December 29, 2014).... MORE

Uzbekistan is conveniently located at the center of Central Asia and borders on all Central Asian countries as well as Afghanistan; moreover, it lies in relatively close proximity to the various prodigiously developing markets of Asia. Nonetheless, Uzbekistan has been slow to embrace or champion... MORE

“No money in the federal budget [of the Russian Federation means] no happiness in the republics of the North Caucasus,” Russian economic geographer Natalya Zubarevich told the Kavkazsky Uzel website. According to the expert, from January to October 2014, the North Caucasus republics received the... MORE

On January 1, 2015, Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, along with Armenia, co-launched the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). The founding treaty of this economic bloc?whose genesis is widely attributed to Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev, although it has become the key focus of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy... MORE