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Recent increases in health rights litigation in low- and middle-income countries triggered debates regarding the effects of such litigation on the equity and effectiveness of health systems. This study examines Indonesia's experience with health rights litigation and efforts promoting health rights in developing countries in general.
Research in recent years on aid effectiveness shows that significant obstacles in fragile states - insecurity, poor governance and weak implementation capacity - usually prevent aid from achieving the desired results in these environments. This study investigates the attributes and effectiveness of donor-supported programmes and projects that worked well under difficult conditions in fragile states. Presented in this study are nine development initiatives in six less developed countries - Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste and Uganda. The cases show that development initiatives, which engage local communities and local level governments, are often able to have signi...
After the Storm discusses restructuring and growth strategies adopted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and South Korea after the currency and financial crisis of 1997-98. These four Asian economies were the most adversely affected despite achieving rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s, with low inflation and current account surpluses. Although macroeconomic fundamentals in these countries were relatively sound prior to the crisis, early analyses of the crisis dwelled on the failure of corporate governance, currency controls and immature financial institutions and infrastructure in some countries. The book offers fresh insights into the causes of the crisis and postcrisis restructuring, the growth strategies adopted, and domestic initiatives taken by these countries. It also reveals why reforms recommended by the IMF, World Bank and others were met with resistance, thereby contributing to the ongoing discourse on the effects of globalisation.
What does policy coherence for development mean? Increasing global integration through trade, capital and labour mobility brings increasing mutual responsibilities and mutual policy repercussions. These realities call for greater coherence between ...
When countries discover that they possess large deposits of oil and natural gas, the news is usually welcome. Yet, paradoxically, if they rely on their wealth of natural resources, they often set down a path of poor economic performance and governance challenges. Only a few resource-rich countries have managed to develop their economies fully and provide a better and sustainable standard of living for large segments of their populations. This phenomenon, known as the resource curse, is a core challenge for energy-exporting states. Beyond the Resource Curse focuses on this relationship between natural wealth and economic security, discussing the particular pitfalls and consistent perils facin...
Multilateral and bilateral aid agencies now direct much of their East Asia activities to so-called ''governance'' reform. Almost every major development project in the region must now be justified in these terms and will usually involve an element of legal institutional reform, anti-corruption initiatives or strengthening of civil society - and often a mix of all of these. Most are, in fact, major exercises in social engineering. Aid agencies and major multilateral players like the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, are attempting not just to improve governance systems and combat corruption but, implicitly, to restructure entire national political systems and administrative ...
A challenging and provocative book that contests the liberal assumption that the rule of law will go hand in hand with a transition to market-based economies and even democracy in East Asia. Using case studies from Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam, the authors argue that the rule of law is in fact more likely to provide political elites with the means closely to control civil society. It is essential, therefore, to locate conceptions of judicial independence and the rule of law more generally within the ideological vocabulary of the state.
Based on new field research, this book assesses the current state of governance and public sector reforms in eleven Asian countries and jurisdictions, especially in the wake of the recent regional financial crisis that seriously affected some of them. It analyses reform efforts comparatively against a backdrop of governance problems, and seeks to establish whether these efforts represent a substantive shift in attitudes towards reform or whether they serve simply to reinforce existing practices. The authors explore a number of important themes that are central to governance and public sector reform issues. These include the role of the state, the success or failure of organizational reforms, corruption, the applicability of the new public management model in the Asian context, and the governance values and reform models promoted by regional and international agencies.
Persistent episodes of global financial crises have placed the existing system of international monetary and financial governance under stress. The resulting economic turmoil provides a focal point for rethinking the norms and institutions of global financial architecture and the policy options of public and private authorities at national, regional and transnational levels. This volume moves beyond analysis of the causes and consequences of recent financial crises and concentrates on issues of policy. Written by distinguished scholars, it focuses on the tension between global market structures and national policy imperatives. Accessible to both specialists and general readers, the analysis is coherent across a broad range of theoretical and empirical cases. Offering a series of reasoned policy responses to financial integration and crises, the volume grapples directly with the institutional and often-neglected normative dimensions of international financial architecture. The volume thus constitutes required reading for scholars and policy-makers.
This book seeks to understand how governance agendas are constructed at both the global and national levels and asks what factors define success and failure in their implementation. It features case studies drawn from Africa, Latin America and Asia.