Our Insights

When considering the financial sector, there's the developed, global financial hub of Singapore and then there's the rest of ASEAN. The city-state dominates sectors including wealth management; local champion DBS Bank is Southeast Asia’s largest lender by assets.

Despite the threat posed to its export model by Donald Trump’s tariffs, Vietnam’s wage growth has outperformed Southeast Asian peers for six straight quarters.

Vietnam's economy has posted years of strong growth, but as its consumers get richer, we can see a disconnect with auto sales: growth began levelling off before the pandemic and has been slowing slightly of late – even before Donald Trump's trade policies started threatening the nation's export model.

Pemex is Mexico's biggest enterprise. As such, the state-owned oil giant can have an outsized impact on the nation's economy, and its operational data can provide an early signal of how other Mexican businesses are performing.

As China moves up the global value chain, its government is keen to promote research & development for advanced industries.

As Donald Trump's tariffs reshape global trade, we've considered how Chinese exports to the US might be redirected to other destinations – in this case, Malaysia.

The decades-long boom in Chinese soybean demand has reshaped Brazilian agriculture; it surpassed the US as the biggest producer of this crop in the 2010s.

Meanwhile, American soy farmers, already dealing with greater seasonal swings than their Brazilian counterparts, have lost share in the Chinese market after a decade of trade friction. (Recent negotiations suggest China might step up purchases of US soybeans again.)

For decades after the 1980s asset bubble, Japan was synonymous with stagnant property values. But today, Tokyo’s prices are soaring.

Deadly flooding in southern Brazil this year devastated communities and disrupted key industries. It also worsened inflation. But that financial impact is easing as premiums return to pre-disaster norms.