Millennial Asia

The study of the nature of public welfare expenditure in healthcare has gained more attention recently. Many studies suggest that as countries are growing economically, becoming more urbanized and industrialized; their welfare expenditure has also increased. Others suggest that countries with higher proportion of older population tend to have larger welfare expenditure. This article uses data on Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries to examine the factors that are claimed to have effect on public welfare expenditure, particularly on healthcare. It is conducted from a public policy’s perspective. Using the two-stage least squares regression, this study finds that health expenditures as percentage of GDP are not significantly determined by the number of elderly. They increase significantly with industrialization and foreign direct investment. This study also finds that economy and urbanization grow faster than health expenditures.

Emerging new information processing and telecommunication technologies have given India an edge in exports of services. The analysis in this regard depicted that competitiveness and performance of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries in services exports is of crucial importance. The analysis in this paper is based on revealed comparative advantage methodology and covers the period 2002–2013. The evidence points out that India managed to produce and export modern services and gained comparative advantage and specialization due to supportive institutions and infrastructure. Further, services exports performance also evidently shows that India has emerged as the largest SAARC country in exports of services especially during the post WTO and GATS era. Therefore, the present study suggests India should invest in research and development of new technologies to produce quality services to further improve its position in world services exports.

This research seeks to establish a conceptual understanding of the extent to which group interactions of cross-cultural workforces affect organizational performance in Malaysian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. Drawing on qualitative case study experiences of ICT SME workforce comprising owners and managers, team leaders, employees and clients, it attempts to understand if culturally diverse teams, through social interaction, exert a positive or a negative effect on team effectiveness. Three separate groups of stakeholders were interviewed over a period of one year who provided divergent perspectives on diversity and team effectiveness. Simultaneously, participant observation techniques were extensively used to gather insights from team-building sessions, annual dinners, new staff induction and other informal events organized by the SMEs under study. The study concluded that though homogeneous sub-groups within cross-cultural workforces teams performed well in delivering technical solutions in the ICT sector, cultural differences created social interaction barriers, particularly communication obstacles, with clients as well as within the team which often hampered work effectiveness. Additionally, the dialectical and ambivalent nature of the technical and social needs of team composition comprising both expatriates and Malaysians provides an interesting arena for further investigation in a wider quantitative survey study to validate the negative outcomes of social interaction on cultural diversity and to contest these theories with positive outcomes as postulated by new organization theories such as informational diversity theory.

The civil wars in Myanmar and Sri Lanka were both long-lasting ethnic conflicts. While the government of Myanmar is still fighting with several ethnic armed groups, a series of ceasefires were reached with around 25 armed groups during 1989–2009, and more after 2011. Sri Lanka also went through a period of seemingly successful peace process during 2002–2003 when the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) agreed to a permanent ceasefire under Norway’s mediation. However, the peace agreement soon failed and the military defeated the Tamils in 2009. Although the two wars had different outcomes—one in relatively successful ceasefires and the other in a military victory, the minorities in both countries are still under the dominance and oppression of the federal government. This paper tries to account for the difference in the settlements of the two wars as well as for the reasons why more durable peace could not be achieved in both cases. It argues that the Myanmar government used the ceasefires as its tool for state consolidation while showing no genuine commitment to a political solution. On the other hand, the Sri Lankan peace process failed because the two parties had completely different visions for a political settlement. Thus, for a peace process to be truly successful, both sides must come to an agreement on a political solution through power-sharing.

Ideas of freedom have been an integral part of the discourses on nationalism and national movements in most of the post-colonial societies, including especially India. These ideas of freedom and anti-colonial movement in India can be looked at from diverse perspectives—it may be liberal, Marxist, neo-Marxist, revolutionaries and even pacifists like Gandhi. This article makes a modest attempt to understand Rajni Kothari’s ideas of freedom, essentially through the prisms of his critical reflections and intervention on state, democracy, development and ‘new’ social or grass-roots movements. Kothari argued that freedom meant both ‘autonomy of man’ as well as ‘autonomy of states’. Embedded in Kothari’s ideas of freedom was the idea of a strong, deep and decentralized democratic structure, politics as a form of social transformation and rather an indigenous, autonomous, self-reliant and an ‘alternative’ model of economic development. However, contemporary India represents and reflects none of these ideas of freedom, whether it will be individual freedom or community freedom. With the decline of the welfare state as an agency pursuing socio-economic development, Kothari invents a ‘new’ idea of freedom as articulated by the grass-roots or ‘new’ social movements, which are essentially ‘non-class’, ‘non-materialistic’, ‘humanist’ and ‘universalist’ in their outlook and approach.

E. E. Sajor, B. P. Resurreccion and S. K. Rakshit (Eds). 2014. Bio-innovation and Poverty Alleviation: Case Studies from Asia . New Delhi: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd, pp. xli + 396, ₹1,100. ISBN: 978-81-321-1972-2 (HB).

T. Haque, Mandira Bhattacharya and Ankita Goyal. 2015. Socio-economic Impact Assessment of Bt Cotton in India , New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company Pvt. Ltd., pp. viii + 146. ₹500. ISBN: 978-93-5125-113-2 (HB).

Vishwajyoti Ghosh (Ed.). 2013. This Side That Side: Restorying Partition. New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, pp. 327. ₹695. ISBN: 93-82579-01-X.