Bloomberg Japanese voters want an election before any hike in taxes to fund Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plans for a record increase in defense spending and providing more support for families with children, according to two polls. About 63% of respondents to a poll by the Nikkei newspaper carried out Jan 27-29 and 77% of those who took part in …

  Bloomberg New Zealand’s new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has boosted his party’s chances at this year’s election, with a poll showing him neck-and-neck with his opponents less than eight months out from the ballot. Support for Hipkins’ Labour Party rose 5 percentage points to 38% in a 1News/Kantar poll published Monday in Wellington, while the main opposition National Party …

  Bloomberg The rupee’s recent gains may prove to be fleeting because of pressure from India’s persistent current-account gap and the central bank building up its foreign-exchange reserves. The currency has lagged peers from the Thai baht to the Indonesian rupiah this month, gaining only 1.4% even amid sustained dollar weakness. QuantEco Research expects the rupee to slip towards 83.5 …