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Among natural gas producing nations, there has been some concern about how the Asia Pacific will meet future demand for energy. We argue that natural gas, both regional and global, will play a vital role. Estimates of potential gas consumption in the region are analyzed and used to develop consensus projections to 2030. These consumption profiles are compared with gas supply estimates including indigenous, pipeline and LNG for the Asia Pacific market. From this analytical framework, we find that demand will be sufficiently large to accommodate supplies from diverse sources including North America, the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, and the Asia Pacific itself. An important policy implication is that gas producing and consuming nations should benefit from promoting gas trade and not be concerned about a situation of potential lack of demand coupled with oversupply.

The nature of the empirical relationship between public expenditure and economic growth can be analysed from different viewpoints. This study focuses on the empirical testing of the validity or otherwise of Wagner's Law for the Indonesian economy. The high growth in the sample period 1980-2014 make Indonesia a likely candidate for it. Causality and cointegrating techniques are used. A key finding in our vector-autoregression analysis is unidirectional causality running from GDP and Prices to Government Expenditure supporting Wagner's Law. In the case of Prices and Government Expenditure there is also evidence of a long-run cointegrating relationship, which appears stable and supports unidirectional causality. The vast majority of the deviations from the equilibrium relationship between Government Expenditure and Prices are found to be transitory shocks to Government Expenditure and significantly countercyclical with economic activity, suggesting that government expenditure does play a role in economic stabilisation.

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