This book explores the role of think tanks in the democratization and economic reform movements by evaluating their overall effect on the transformation process in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Comparative Public Budgeting and Finance is a collection of original chapters examining public budgeting issues, methods, and techniques in countries around the world. Each chapter explores the history of the budget system and how it fits within the political system in the country, as well as the legal foundation and any reforms that affect the budget system. A discussion of revenue and expenditure allocations is included in each section. Each chapter also examines topics such as: budget behavior and decision making, capital budgeting, analytical processes, budget processes, intergovernmental relations, budget reform, performance budgeting, and financial management. Each chapter concludes with a list of thought provoking questions, an appendix, end notes and a glossary which provides a point of departure for classroom discussion as well as individual student research on each country.
This publication is part of a three-volume study on lessons learned and implications for agriculture and food security in the context of rapid growth in selected Asian economies. This volume summarises the main findings of the five country case studies (China, India, the Republic of Korea, Thailand and Viet Nam) on lessons learned to assist countries in restructuring their agricultural sectors for sustainable rural development in response to changing market and trade opportunities, and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on poverty and hunger eradication.
Why do some middle-income countries diversify their economies but fail to upgrade – to produce world-class products based on local inputs and technological capacities? Why have the 'little tigers' of Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, continued to lag behind the Newly Industrializing Countries of East Asia? Richard Doner goes beyond 'political will' by emphasizing institutional capacities and political pressures: development challenges vary; upgrading poses tough challenges that require robust institutional capacities. Such strengths are political in origin. They reflect pressures, such as security threats and resource constraints, which motivate political leaders to focus on efficiency more than clientelist payoffs. Such pressures help to explain the political institutions – 'veto players' – through which leaders operate. Doner assesses this argument by analyzing Thai development historically, in three sectors (sugar, textiles, and autos) and in comparison with both weaker and stronger competitors (Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Brazil, and South Korea).
The book examines the contract farming systems in Thailand and India with focus on the role of the State in these two countries. The study is based on case studies of four agri-Business firms and their farmers in Northern Thailand in potato and sweet corn crops. This study also attempts to look out the larger impacts of contracting on the local economy in these two countries. The book will he highly useful for stake holders in contract farming-policy makers, academics, agri-business firms etc.
This interdisciplinary book offers a critical analysis of Thai education and its evolution, providing diverse perspectives and theoretical frameworks. In the past five decades Thailand has seen impressive economic success and it is now a middle-income country that provides development assistance to poorer countries. However, educational and social development have lagged considerably behind itsglobally recognized economic success. This comprehensive book covers each level of education, such as higher and vocational/technical education, and such topics as internationalization, inequalities and disparities, alternative education, non-formal and informal education, multilingual education, educational policy and planning, and educational assessment. The 25 Thai and 8 international contributors to the volume include well-known academics and practitioners. Thai education involves numerous paradoxes, which are identified and explained. While Thailand has impressively expanded its educational system quantitatively with much massification, quality problems persist at all levels. As such, the final policy-oriented summary chapter suggests strategies to enable Thailand to escape “the middle income trap” and enhance the quality of its education to ensure its long-term developmental success.
The number of humanitarian disasters triggered by a natural hazard has doubled every decade since the 1960s. At the same time, the global economic growth rate per capita is twice its 1960s value. Does this mean economic growth is independent of the impacts of natural disaster? Natural Disaster and Development in a Globalizing World is the first book to acknowledge the full implications of globalization for disaster and development. The contributors to this book fully examine: global processes and how they might affect disaster risk at the global scale. links between international issues - such as diplomatic relations, the growth of non-governmental organizations and the health of the international insurance industry - and disaster risk the interaction of these large scale forces with local conditions through case study analysis of individual disaster events. In his revealing work, author Pelling makes clear the links between global scale processes and local experiences of disaster, and underlies the difficulty of attributing blame for individual disasters on specific global pressures. He argues that action to reduce disaster must be coordinated at the local, national and global scales and that there is a need for greater integration across the physical and social sciences. In this context, the human rights agenda is seen as a way of moving disaster reduction efforts forward.
This book reviews the contemporary issues in international monetary and financial economics (such as financial liberalisation, crisis, exchange rate determination, capital control, domestic capital market reform, etc.) in an emerging financial market such as Thailand from a welfare economic p- spective, highlighting the social welfare implications of these issues. This 3 book also suggests a normative social approach (as formalised in the new welfare economics paradigm) (see Islam 2001a,b for a discussion of this ; concept) for analysing and addressing these issues and formulating appr- riate policies. Undertaking the above tasks, the asymmetric information paradigm 3 and other elements of the new welfare economics paradigm are adapted in analysing the international financial issues of Thailand, their causes and economic and social welfare consequences. The last two decades have been a critical period for Thailand’s dev- opment. From the mid-1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, the Thai economy performed remarkably well and was a showcase for the world economy. Having achieved a double-digit growth rate for a brief period, Thailand in the late 1980s was regarded as the fastest growing economy in the world by the World Bank and the IMF. With prospects of further rapid economic growth, the Thai government accepted Article VIII of the IMF, which required Thailand to liberalise and deregulate its financial system.
This book covers nine countries of ASEAN and the East Asian area, including major Asian countries, and compares their respective policies to attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). Through comparative study of FDI promotion policies, this book will give policy makers in the area of FDI promotion an overview and comparison of the FDI policies of other countries. In addition, researchers at graduate, post-graduate or professional level will gain from the econometric methodology and detailed definitions of various spillover effects (horizontal and vertical), which will be beneficial to their research. In addition to FDI policy comparison, this book focuses on the various spillover effects of FDI. It separates it into categories: own productivity effects; intra-industry spillover effects; and inter-industry spillover effects (forward and backward linkage effects). While most other studies have only taken econometric tests on own-productivity and intra-industry spillovers, a key advantage to this book is that it also covers the separate effects of inter-industry linkages. Through policy comparison and econometric tests on various spillover effects on economic growth, employment and exports, this book will give policy makers and researchers an innovative and constructive guide to FDI.