Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Mukul G. Asher, NUS
The announcement of the April 2012–March 2013 budget for India’s western state of Gujarat is a timely reminder that state budgets deserve a more prominent role in policy debates about India’s public financial management.
States play a critical role in delivering public services and in implementing central government schemes. Read more…
Author: Sugata Marjit, CSSS
‘Growth versus equity’ is a theme that continues to occupy most of the policy debates in India, particularly after two decades of experimenting with economic reform.
The outcome of the reform process has been mixed: India’s commendable trend rate of economic growth is unfortunately accompanied by a sustained and increasing degree of inequality. Read more…
Author: Madhu Purnima Kishwar, CSDS
‘Development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ are politically loaded terms.
Most ‘underdeveloped’ societies have a colonial past in which their people and resources were economically exploited and their social, cultural and political institutions were wrecked. Read more…
Author: Rajesh Basrur, RSIS
Though India is widely regarded as a ‘rising power’, the government has not publicly set out its grand strategy or the direction it is taking.
There is still much debate on critical issues such as the viability of its liberal economic model and its relationship with the United States. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
With all the focus on the transition of power between China and the United States in the Asian Century, too little attention is given to how India might handle its growing weight in the world.
India is more often than not taken for granted, seen as a pawn in the growing power game between America and China, or so pre-occupied within its region as to stunt its potential global role. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
The 21st-century Asian order has entered a long interregnum between the hub-and-spokes security bilateralism of the US-engineered San Francisco system and the re-emergence of East Asia’s pre-modern international system.
To harmonise the interests of individual states with the requirements of the system at large in the decades ahead, the foremost challenge in the Asian Century will be to nudge the region’s geo-politics toward cooperation — perhaps even a loose concert of powers — as opposed to competition, conflict and division.
Author: Ronojoy Sen, NUS
The Indian National Congress was the biggest loser in the recent Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections — one of five Indian state elections that began last month.
Meanwhile, the Samajwadi Party’s (SP) big win in UP confounded most analysts.
Author: Takenori Horimoto, Shobi University
India and Pakistan saw a major breakthrough for their fragile relationship in November 2011 when Pakistan announced it would grant India most favoured nation (MFN) status.
India offered Pakistan MFN status back in 1996, but Pakistan was hesitant to reciprocate. So, what is behind Pakistan’s recent move and what are the likely implications? Read more…
Author: Shameem Black, ANU
Literature and literary scholarship from India, though sometimes unacknowledged, have been at the forefront of revitalising interest in the idea of ‘world literature’ — a field of study that stresses global circulation, transcultural reading practices, broad structural patterns, and often unexpected connections among books and readers.
As India has grown in prominence on a world stage, so too have its writers. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed a dramatic boom in Indian writers working in English, Read more…
Author: Rajat Kathuria, IMI
The Supreme Court of India sent the country’s telecoms sector a much needed wake-up call on 2 February, annulling 122 licences across nine different companies.
The Court held that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had severely abused the principles of fairness and transparency in the assignment of these licenses to favour a small number of select operators in January 2008. Read more…
Author: Mohsin Khan, PIIE, Washington, DC
Why do India and Pakistan trade so little with each other despite the existence of a common history, language and culture, as well as a long common border?
Theory would predict that trade between the two largest economies in South Asia would be much greater than its current level of around US$2 billion per year. Read more…
Author: Mahendra Ved, New Delhi
It is universal across South Asia that when in need of something at home, one knocks at the door of one’s neighbour for help. But that is not true of India and Pakistan.
They do not trade enough directly. Their traders resort to third-country transactions. Even trade under duress to surmount an emergency or crop failure is rare. Read more…
Author: Kama Maclean, UNSW
At the Sydney Cricket Ground on 5 January 2012, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke confidently about the upswing in Australia–India relations — which had been strained since the violent attacks on Indian students in 2009 — citing cricket as the ‘common language’ of the relationship.
In the closing days of 2011, Gillard had also helped to remove an important irritant in the bilateral relationship as she championed and pushed through a change to Australian Labor Party policy, which had precluded the sale of uranium to India.
Author: Prashanth Parameswaran, Tufts University
The 4 February vote on the Syrian crisis at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has led many commentators to declare a ‘watershed’ in Indian foreign policy.
Instead of abstaining — as it has usually done on questions regarding the Arab Spring — India voted in favour of the resolution. Read more…
Authors: Rajiv Kumar and Soumya Kanti Ghosh, FICCI
The prevalence of malnutrition in India is a cause for serious concern.
In order to eliminate this problem, a food subsidy bill (FSB) has been proposed. But the fiscal viability of the proposed FSB is unclear and the delivery outcomes could be highly compromised given current weaknesses in governance and the ineffective delivery mechanisms in place. Read more…