The framework, which covers 193 countries and 36 territories, rests on a conceptual distinction between primary and secondary availability. Primary availability attributes cobalt according to the corporate ownership of the mines and processing facilities that extract it, asking which countries’ firms and investors hold the equity stakes that give them claims on output. Secondary availability attributes cobalt according to international trade, following the metal as it moves across borders in concentrates, intermediates and refined chemicals. The authors then compare both attribution perspectives against a combined baseline scenario built from geographic production and pre-trade viewpoints, which represents the traditional way of thinking about mineral endowment. The gap between the baseline and the ownership- and trade-adjusted pictures quantifies, for the first time in a systematic way, how much foreign direct investment and trade each reshape national cobalt access.

This matters because cobalt supply is extraordinarily concentrated. A handful of countries, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo dominating mine output, produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s primary cobalt, and a small number of refining hubs, most prominently China, process the bulk of intermediate materials into battery-grade compounds. Under a purely geographic lens, most countries appear to have essentially no cobalt availability at all. But ownership and trade complicate that picture enormously. Mining companies headquartered in one country routinely operate assets in another, and the resulting output flows through multi-stage supply chains that crisscross the globe before ending up in cathodes and finished batteries. The new framework is designed to capture exactly these layers of indirection.

The headline quantitative findings are striking. Relative to the combined baseline scenario, total cobalt availability is higher in 63.6 percent of the countries analyzed, meaning that when ownership and trade are taken into account, nearly two-thirds of nations end up with more effective access to cobalt than their geological endowment or territorial production would suggest. When the researchers weight primary and secondary availability equally in a composite measure, 72.7 percent of countries show a positive change. In other words, the mechanisms of globalized investment and commerce are not zero-sum transfers that enrich a few intermediaries at everyone else’s expense; for most countries, participation in these networks increases the cobalt they can effectively draw upon.

Perhaps the most consequential result, however, concerns concentration. Foreign direct investment and international trade do not change the total amount of cobalt available to humanity, the global sum is fixed by geology and extraction economics. What they do change is how that fixed total is spread across countries. The study finds that both mechanisms reduce the concentration of cobalt availability, redistributing effective access from a tiny cluster of production territories toward a much broader set of nations connected through investment ties and trade relationships. This reframing has immediate implications for how policymakers think about critical mineral security, because a country’s vulnerability to supply disruption depends less on whether cobalt is mined within its borders and more on the structure of the corporate and commercial networks in which it participates.

Technically, the dual-attribution approach required reconciling datasets that are rarely combined. Ownership attribution demands information on the corporate structure of mining and refining enterprises, including the ultimate parent companies behind joint ventures in producing countries, so that output can be assigned to the jurisdictions where controlling capital resides. Trade attribution, by contrast, relies on bilateral trade flows in cobalt-bearing commodities at multiple stages of processing, distinguishing ores and concentrates from unwrought intermediates and refined oxides and hydroxides. By computing both perspectives for every country and comparing them with the geographic-production and pre-trade baseline, the team could decompose the composite change in availability into a component driven by investment and a component driven by trade, exposing which channel dominates for each nation.

The results illuminate asymmetries that a single-lens analysis would hide. Countries that host mines but lack domestic ownership may show high geographic production while their ownership-attributed availability is far lower, with the difference flowing to the home countries of the investing firms. Conversely, countries with negligible mining but strong refining industries and dense import networks can accumulate substantial secondary availability through trade. The framework also captures intermediate cases, such as producing countries that have attracted foreign investment and simultaneously export processed goods, where primary and secondary attributions pull in different directions. Mapping these configurations across nearly two hundred economies turns an abstract debate about resource globalization into a concrete, country-by-country accounting.

For resource governance, the implications cut in several directions. Host countries, particularly in the developing world, may find that the cobalt extracted on their territory generates effective availability elsewhere, strengthening arguments for policies that link mining concessions to domestic processing, equity participation or export constraints. Exporting and investing countries, meanwhile, gain a quantitative basis for understanding how their corporate presence abroad translates into strategic material access, a consideration increasingly central to industrial strategies in the United States, the European Union, China and elsewhere. The authors emphasize that policies which account for both host-country and exporting-country perspectives are more likely to produce durable and equitable outcomes than measures designed from a single vantage point.

The study also arrives at a moment when cobalt demand trajectories are fiercely debated. Battery chemistries are shifting, with manufacturers reducing cobalt content in some cathode types while others, such as high-nickel formulations for long-range vehicles, remain cobalt-dependent. Recycling is expected to grow but cannot yet displace primary supply at scale. Against that backdrop, knowing who effectively holds cobalt availability, and through which channel, is essential input for scenario planning. A disruption in a producing region, a change in export policy, or a shift in ownership of a major mining asset propagates through the dual channels the framework describes, and the country-level sensitivity to each channel varies widely.

Methodologically, the dual-attribution framework is generalizable beyond cobalt. The same logic, attributing primary availability through corporate ownership and secondary availability through trade, could be applied to lithium, nickel, graphite, rare earth elements or any other critical mineral whose supply chains are globalized. As governments build critical mineral stockpiles, negotiate strategic partnerships and scrutinize foreign investment in mining sectors, tools of this kind offer a way to move beyond production statistics toward a genuinely structural understanding of resource access. The study’s central message is deceptively simple but far-reaching: in a globalized economy, the geography of what a country has and the geography of what a country can use are two different questions, and answering only the first one leaves policymakers flying blind on the second.

Subject of Research: How foreign direct investment and international trade redistribute country-level cobalt availability

Article Title: A dual-attribution framework reveals how foreign investment and trade redistribute cobalt availability

Article References: Liu, L., Zhang, L., Jiang, S., Li, Y., Li, R., Mei, Z., Yuan, Z., & Chen, J. (2026). A dual-attribution framework reveals how foreign investment and trade redistribute cobalt availability. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78222-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78222-4

Keywords: cobalt, foreign direct investment, international trade, critical minerals, supply chains, resource governance, battery materials, mineral availability, dual-attribution framework, Nature Communications, mining ownership, global concentration

This year’s intake is notable for the breadth of new ground it covers. The 2026 cohort introduces fellows from four countries that had never been represented in the program before: Bulgaria, New Zealand, Thailand, and Venezuela. That expansion pushes the fellowship’s cumulative footprint to its current total of 60 countries and territories, a figure that underscores how a program rooted in Hong Kong has gradually woven itself into policy, business, and civil society networks on nearly every continent. For the institute, the widening map is more than a statistic; it reflects the premise on which the fellowship was built, namely that the complex problems confronting governments and economies in the 2020s cannot be understood from any single regional vantage point.

The professional depth of the cohort is striking. On average, the 2026 fellows bring nineteen years of professional experience to Hong Kong, drawn from public policy, business, civil society, and multilateral organisations. That figure places the group firmly in the mid-career bracket that the program targets: individuals senior enough to shape decisions within their own institutions, yet early enough in their trajectories for an intensive period of cross-cultural exchange to alter how they approach those decisions. The fellowship’s model rests on the idea that policy innovation travels through people rather than documents, and that embedding experienced practitioners in a shared residential environment produces conversations and collaborations that conventional conferences rarely achieve.

Professor Heiwai Tang, Director of the Asia Global Institute, Victor and William Fung Professor in Economics, and Associate Vice-President (Global) at HKU, welcomed the incoming group and framed the program’s continuing mission. We are pleased to welcome this international group to HKU, he said. The AsiaGlobal Fellows Program continues to analyse complex global issues through Asian perspectives, facilitating the cross-cultural dialogue needed to address modern policy challenges. His comments position the fellowship within a broader intellectual project: the effort to build analytical frameworks for globalisation, trade, technology governance, and sustainable development that take Asian experience and Asian voices as central rather than peripheral to the conversation.

The individual profiles within the 2026 cohort illustrate the range of expertise the program has assembled. Among the selected fellows is Angel Eduardo Cardenas Sosa, a Venezuelan finance executive who manages a transport, energy, and digital infrastructure portfolio valued at more than twelve billion dollars for CAF, the development bank of Latin America. His presence in Hong Kong links the fellowship directly to the financing questions that dominate infrastructure policy across emerging economies, from how to fund resilient energy grids to how digital connectivity can be extended to underserved populations. Infrastructure finance has become one of the defining policy battlegrounds of the decade, and a fellow with hands-on responsibility for a multibillion-dollar portfolio brings practical weight to those discussions.

Another fellow, Priscilla Gatonye of Kenya, serves as a UNESCO-UNEVOC officer coordinating global Technical and Vocational Education and Training policy across a network of more than 250 centres. Her work sits at the intersection of education policy, labour markets, and international development, a space that has grown increasingly consequential as economies worldwide grapple with skills gaps, automation, and the transition to greener industries. Calum Handforth, a British specialist with the United Nations Development Programme, adds a technology governance dimension to the cohort; he has advised heads of state on artificial intelligence governance across nearly forty countries. As governments race to establish regulatory frameworks for AI, the presence of someone who has worked directly with national leaders on these questions gives the 2026 cohort a front-row perspective on one of the most contested policy domains of the era.

The cohort also bridges the worlds of technology entrepreneurship and international commerce. Mika Noh, a South Korean tech entrepreneur, is the founder of AI Culture Lab, an organisation pioneering the application of artificial intelligence, culture, and digital media to drive regional creative industries. Her work reflects a growing recognition that AI is not solely a regulatory or industrial challenge but also a cultural force reshaping how content is produced and consumed. Raquel Ramirez, an American vice-president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, drives national policy advocacy, government relations, and market access for a network of more than 1,700 European companies. Her vantage point on the commercial and diplomatic frictions between major economies offers the group a grounded view of how trade policy is negotiated and experienced at the level of individual firms.

During their eight-week residency, the fellows will live and work in Hong Kong, immersing themselves in the city’s distinctive position as a hub where East Asian, Western, and global currents of commerce, finance, and governance converge. The program’s structure typically combines seminars, field visits, and collaborative projects, encouraging fellows to test their assumptions against the perspectives of peers from radically different professional and national contexts. The institute has confirmed that the 2026 fellows are available for media interviews, academic panels, and speaking engagements throughout their stay, a provision that opens their expertise to journalists, researchers, and the wider Hong Kong public while the cohort is in residence.

The Asia Global Institute itself occupies a specific niche in the landscape of policy research. An independent think tank based at The University of Hong Kong, it generates and disseminates innovative thinking and policy-relevant research on global issues from Asian perspectives, with the stated aim of informing global policy and actions towards a prosperous and sustainable future for all. The fellowship is among its flagship activities, and the tenth-anniversary cohort arrives at a moment when the demand for such convening power appears to be growing. Questions of AI governance, infrastructure finance, vocational education, and trade diplomacy, all represented within this single cohort, are precisely the issues on which international coordination has struggled in recent years, and programs that build durable personal networks across borders argue that they offer a corrective to that fragmentation.

As the 2026 fellows settle into their Hong Kong residence, the tenth edition of the AsiaGlobal Fellows Program stands as a case study in how a regional institution can cultivate a genuinely global community of practice. From its base at HKU, the program has grown from an initial experiment into a network of 120 alumni across 60 countries and territories, now joined by a new class whose members manage billion-dollar portfolios, coordinate United Nations policy networks, advise heads of state, and build companies at the frontier of artificial intelligence. Whether the next decade of the fellowship can match the geographic and professional expansion of its first ten years remains to be seen, but the 2026 cohort suggests that the institute’s core proposition, that global problems demand dialogue conducted from Asian perspectives, continues to attract accomplished practitioners from around the world.

Subject of Research: The 2026 AsiaGlobal Fellows Program at the University of Hong Kong and its international cohort of mid-career policy professionals

Article Title: Marking a decade of impact: HKU welcomes 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal fellows

Article References: Marking a decade of impact: HKU welcomes 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal fellows. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: AsiaGlobal Fellows, University of Hong Kong, Asia Global Institute, policy fellowship, global governance, artificial intelligence, infrastructure finance, vocational education, international trade, Hong Kong, cross-cultural dialogue, mid-career professionals

The research tackles a long-standing blind spot in climate economics. When a country exports goods, the emissions generated in producing them are counted in the exporting nation’s territorial inventory, even though the goods are consumed elsewhere. This mismatch, known as the problem of embodied or trade-embedded emissions, has been studied extensively since Davis and Caldeira’s landmark consumption-based accounting work, but most analyses treat exports as a single undifferentiated flow. Ünal and Erkök argue that this flattening hides the very information policymakers need. An export of finished consumer goods and an export of intermediate components that feed a partner’s own industrial production have very different implications for how carbon pricing, border adjustments, or supply chain regulations will shift emissions between countries.

To unpack these differences, the authors deploy an environmentally extended input-output framework built on the Eora Global Supply Chain Database, combined with a technique called the Multi-Stage Hypothetical Extraction Method. Hypothetical extraction is a thought experiment rendered in matrix algebra: the analyst mathematically removes a sector, or a demand channel, from the economy’s input-output structure and measures how much output and, in this case, how much carbon dioxide the rest of the system loses as a result. The difference between the original economy and the extracted one quantifies the sector’s total systemic importance, capturing both its direct emissions and the emissions embedded in all the upstream linkages that depend on it. The multi-stage refinement goes further by decomposing exports into intermediate goods and final goods, and by splitting final demand into household consumption, government expenditure, and investment channels, allowing emissions to be traced along distinct domestic production stages for each destination market.

The study focuses on six major trading partners of Türkiye: France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This selection spans the European Union markets that dominate Turkish trade, the transatlantic relationship, and a neighboring energy economy, providing a diverse test bed for the method. For each partner, the researchers calculated the carbon dioxide emissions embodied in Turkish exports and, crucially, a set of efficiency measures that relate those emissions to the economic value delivered. It is the efficiency dimension that produced the study’s most alarming headline result: a systemic deterioration in carbon dioxide efficiency across most destinations, meaning that progressively more emissions are being generated per unit of export value delivered to these markets.

The structural decomposition reveals that intermediate goods typically dominate the emissions profile of Turkish exports. This matters because intermediate goods occupy a particularly awkward position in climate policy. They cross borders as inputs to further production, so their embodied carbon will only be fully accounted for when the final product is eventually sold, often in a third country. Under mechanisms such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which is designed to prevent carbon leakage by pricing the embedded emissions of imports, the treatment of intermediate goods remains one of the most contested design questions. The finding that Türkiye’s export emissions concentrate in these upstream flows suggests that the country’s industrial base is deeply integrated into European and global value chains in ways that make it structurally exposed to any tightening of carbon accounting at the border.

The United Kingdom emerges as a distinctive case. Unlike the other partners, where either intermediate or final goods tend to dominate, the UK’s import profile from Türkiye shows a broad reliance on both categories simultaneously. This dual dependence means that British demand pulls carbon out of the Turkish economy through two separate channels at once, amplifying the total systemic liability and complicating any single-lever policy response. As the UK develops its own post-Brexit carbon border policies, the study’s results imply that Turkish exporters will face pressure from both ends of their product mix rather than from a single vulnerable segment.

Perhaps the most striking results concern the role of government demand, which behaves in sharply different ways depending on the partner. In France and Italy, state-procured government expenditures drive intense emissions liabilities, channeled primarily through Türkiye’s petroleum and chemical sectors. In other words, when the French or Italian state buys goods with Turkish content, the production cascade that follows leans heavily on some of the most carbon-intensive links in the Turkish industrial chain. By contrast, in Iraq and the United States, government expenditure acts less as a direct trigger and more as a deep systemic dependency, anchored in the utility and heavy manufacturing sectors. These partner-specific patterns demonstrate that the same category of final demand can produce qualitatively different carbon consequences depending on the industrial structure it activates, a nuance that aggregate trade-emissions statistics completely obscure.

Underlying all of these patterns is a remarkably concentrated industrial structure. Four sector groups account for the dominant shares of the efficiency effects the authors measure: textiles, transport equipment, petroleum and chemical products, and electricity and gas provisions. This concentration is both a vulnerability and an opportunity. It is a vulnerability because it means Türkiye’s export carbon footprint is not broadly distributed across the economy but is instead pinned to a handful of energy-intensive nodes, several of which are precisely the sectors most likely to be targeted by carbon border measures and by competition from lower-carbon producers. It is an opportunity because targeted interventions at a small number of chokepoints, such as decarbonizing the electricity and gas supply that feeds industrial production, or modernizing petroleum and chemical processing, could deliver disproportionate improvements in the carbon efficiency of the entire export apparatus.

The authors draw a clear policy conclusion from this structure: mitigation efforts must be targeted and partner-specific rather than uniform. Because the emissions liabilities attached to French government procurement arise through different sectors than those attached to American systemic dependencies, a single national decarbonization strategy will not address all exposures equally. Instead, the findings argue for industrial policies and technological investments calibrated to the specific production stages and demand channels that generate the largest efficiency losses for each destination. The open availability of the study’s processed datasets and analysis code in a public GitHub repository lowers the barrier for other researchers to extend the multi-stage extraction approach to other economies, and the method itself, which links classical linkage analysis in the tradition of Hirschman and Rasmussen to modern environmental accounting, offers a template for dissecting how carbon flows through the layered stages of globalized production.

As carbon border regulations spread and trading partners begin pricing the emissions embedded in imports, studies of this kind are likely to become essential reading for policymakers in emerging industrial economies. The Turkish case shows that the question is no longer simply how much carbon a country exports, but through which sectors, along which production stages, and in response to whose demand. Answering that question with the granularity that the multi-stage hypothetical extraction method provides may determine which economies adapt smoothly to a carbon-constrained trading system and which find their industrial linkages transformed into liabilities overnight.

Subject of Research: Export-embodied CO2 emissions and carbon leakage in Turkiye's trade analyzed via multi-stage hypothetical extraction

Article Title: Sectoral linkages and carbon leakage: A multi-stage hypothetical extraction analysis of export-embodied emissions

Article References: Ünal, E., & Erkök, B. (2026). Sectoral linkages and carbon leakage: A multi-stage hypothetical extraction analysis of export-embodied emissions. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2189-2207. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00149-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00149-2

Keywords: carbon leakage, embodied emissions, input-output analysis, hypothetical extraction method, Turkiye, international trade, CO2 efficiency, intermediate goods, carbon border adjustment, industrial policy, global value chains, Eora database

The research, led by Wong Sing Yun of Universiti Malaysia Sabah together with colleagues in Malaysia, China and Indonesia, applied pooled regression analysis to monthly data covering the acute phase of the pandemic. At the heart of the analysis sits the Oxford Stringency Index, a widely used composite measure that scores government containment policies on a scale from zero to 100, capturing restrictions on movement, border closures and workplace controls. By logging all variables to counter heteroscedasticity, the team estimated how changes in stringency, alongside consumer prices and exchange rates, shaped the value of goods flowing from China into Malaysia each month.

The headline result is unambiguous for the importing country itself: as Malaysia’s Stringency Index climbed, imports from China fell. Stricter lockdown conditions compressed import volumes through two channels the authors identify, a logistical one and a demand-driven one. Border closures and mobility restrictions made it increasingly difficult for goods to be physically transported into the country, while severe curbs on ordinary economic activity depressed households’ and firms’ appetite for foreign products. The finding aligns with earlier evidence from other researchers who documented adverse pandemic effects on trade flows, but it extends that literature in a direction previously understudied in Malaysia, where most work had focused on exports rather than imports.

The surprise lies in the opposite direction of the partner-country effect. China’s own Stringency Index carried a significant positive coefficient in the regression, meaning that tighter containment inside China did not suppress Malaysia’s imports and may even have coincided with stronger flows. The authors attribute this to the composition of bilateral trade, which is dominated by intermediate goods and production inputs rather than final consumer products. Demand for these inputs is anchored in manufacturing requirements and supply-chain needs, making it relatively insensitive to short-term disruptions. China’s containment strategy also included differentiated lockdowns, prioritisation of key manufacturing sectors and measures to facilitate international logistics, all of which helped preserve export capacity even while domestic mobility was constrained.

Theoretically, the study leans on the Gravity Model of Trade, the workhorse framework first proposed by Jan Tinbergen in 1962, which holds that bilateral trade grows with the economic size of partners and shrinks with the distance between them. Modern extensions recognise that trade costs encompass institutional, policy and regulatory barriers, not just physical geography. The pandemic introduced a novel kind of friction: measures that raised the effective cost of trading without changing distance at all. By inserting both countries’ Stringency Indices into the gravity equation as proxies for these temporary, policy-induced trade resistances, the researchers captured a dimension of trade costs that conventional models never contemplated.

The disruption did not occur in isolation. The study’s contextual analysis describes how early lockdowns in the European Union and the Schengen area generated immediate cross-border transportation delays and skewed freight capacities, cascading through international shipping networks into Asian bilateral trade. Indonesia, Malaysia’s close neighbour, saw second-quarter 2020 imports fall by 17 percent year on year, with services exports hit even harder, dropping by roughly 40 percent between the first two quarters of 2020. Malaysia itself endured its steepest trade contraction since 2009, with exports down 25.5 percent and imports down 30.4 percent year on year in May 2020. These numbers illustrate how a health crisis in one region became a logistics crisis everywhere.

Maritime geography magnified Malaysia’s exposure. The country hosts the Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes, traversed by more than 80,000 vessels annually and carrying an estimated quarter of globally traded goods. When containment policies worldwide constricted shipping, these corridors experienced unprecedented friction. Malaysia’s shipping industry, although designated an essential service and permitted to operate throughout lockdown, suffered heavy losses, with the Malaysia Shipowners’ Association reporting routine short-term losses of between RM15 million and RM30 million during normal operations due to reduced traffic and transport volumes. Port congestion, cancelled shipments and delayed cargo handling at hubs such as Port Klang further slowed supply-chain operations.

Consumer behaviour added another layer of turbulence. Facing lockdowns of unknown duration, many Malaysian households engaged in panic buying and hoarding, spiking demand for essentials such as vegetables and food. Simultaneously, fears of infection raised demand for hygiene products, including face masks and hand sanitizers. The result was a distorted demand landscape in which some categories surged while others collapsed as consumption was forcibly halted. Notably, products such as textile face masks and protective medical clothing, classified as textile goods, experienced comparatively smaller negative shocks despite the broader weakness in Malaysian textiles.

Recovery, when it came, was rapid and instructive. As restrictions eased from mid-2020, Malaysia’s trade rebounded strongly, and total trade surpassed RM2 trillion in 2021, the fastest annual growth since 1994, expanding 24.8 percent to RM2.2 trillion. Imports rose 23.3 percent to RM987.2 billion, led by Selangor, Penang and Johor, with electrical and electronic products and electronic integrated circuits driving much of the gain. By March 2022, bilateral trade with China had grown 15.2 percent year on year to RM39.2 billion, marking sixteen consecutive months of double-digit growth and accounting for 16.5 percent of Malaysia’s total trade.

The authors translate their findings into a clear policy agenda for future crises. Rather than broad industrial strategies, they recommend prioritising digital trade facilitation, including automated customs clearance, paperless trade documentation and electronic data exchange, so that commerce can continue with minimal physical administrative interaction when mobility restrictions bite. They also point to flexible instruments deployed during the pandemic, such as temporary tariff exemptions on personal protective equipment and relaxed import licensing for critical supplies, as templates for crisis-management frameworks. The study acknowledges its limitations, notably a short 28-month sample confined to the acute pandemic phase, and calls for future research extending into post-pandemic periods and incorporating infection rates, vaccination progress and fiscal stimulus to build a fuller picture of trade resilience under systemic disruption.

Subject of Research: The impact of COVID-19 government policy stringency on Malaysia's import flows from China

Article Title: Government policy stringency and import flows from China evidence from Malaysia

Article References: Yun, W. S., Ridzuan, A. R., Zhang, R., Pratiwi, I. A. M., & Juhan, N. (2026). Government policy stringency and import flows from China evidence from Malaysia. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00610-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00610-4

Keywords: COVID-19, Malaysia, China, international trade, stringency index, imports, gravity model, supply chains, lockdown policy, maritime trade, economic policy, ASEAN