The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a recently established Free Trade Agreement between Asia-Pacific countries with the goal of increasing trade between participating countries. A total of twenty Chapters, seventeen Annexes, and fifty-four schedules of obligations are included in the agreement between its partners, with legal features correlating to the explorations of its interactions with member countries. RCEP established an integrated market with 15 member countries, which has facilitated the mobility of products and services among them. It aims to negotiate on trade in products and services, investment, intellectual property, dispute settlement, e-commerce, small and medium-sized firms, and economic cooperation. Currently, it is the world's largest free trade agreement in terms of economic impact, and it has the potential to promote trade and integration among member countries. The objectives of this chapter are to evaluate the opportunities and challenges RCEP faces. We focus primarily on secondary data gathered from scholarly journals and formal reports. RCEP has the potential to expand economic growth among the participating countries. However, one of the challenges that needs to be considered is that some countries may be in a less advantageous position, as the agreements made might affect their internal economic development. We argue that despite the numerous advantages of the Partnership, all members must be able to address the four major issues identified in this chapter if they were to benefit fully from the RCEP.

As the COVID-19 outbreak remains an ongoing issue, there are concerns about its disruption, the level of its disruption, how long this pandemic is going to last, and how innovative technological solutions like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and expert systems can assist to deal with this pandemic. AI has the potential to provide extremely accurate insights for an organization to make better decisions based on collected data. Despite the numerous advantages that may be achieved by AI, the use of AI can be perceived differently by society, where moral and ethical issues may be raised, especially in regards to accessing and exploiting public data gathered from social media platforms. To better comprehend the concerns and ethical challenges, utilitarianism and deontology were used as business ethics frameworks to explore the aforementioned challenges of AI in society. The framework assists in determining whether the AI’s deployment is ethically acceptable or not. The paper lays forth policy recommendations for public and private organizations to embrace AI-based decision-making processes to avoid data privacy violations and maintain public trust.

This study examines young adults’ attitudes towards marriage and family formation in Bruneian society. Questionnaires were distributed to a group of undergraduate students aged 17-31. Findings show that the majority of young adults in the study expected to be married within an ideal age range of 25-29, a period in their lives when they also ideally want to have their first child. However, respondents overwhelmingly agree that marriage should take place after graduating from university, and more importantly, after finding a stable job. This signifies not only an idealisation of a sequence of life course events that diverges from the traditional Bruneian Malay Muslim cultural narrative(in terms of timing of marriage and family formation), but also suggests increasingly heterogeneous life course pathways that might not be as predictable, given the challenges in securing a job (or a spouse), after graduation. This study, thus, sheds light on the transition to adulthood among Bruneians, and offers a glimpse of the motivations behind increasing ages at first marriage, increasing proportions of female singlehood, and apparent desires for smaller families that characterise the Bruneian population today.

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