Introduction

While economic growth in most East and Southeast Asian countries has been remarkably rapid during the past 25 years, the same cannot be said for the Philippines. The country's economic growth has barely exceeded the population growth rate, which has continued to expand relatively rapidly at 2.04% a year so far in the current decade (2000–2009). Economic growth quickened in the first half of the decade, but questions linger about its sustainability. Even at the 2004–2006 pace (5–6% per year), the Philippines has not come close to the growth trajectories of its neighbors. Thus, serious students of Philippine development contend that shifting the economy to a higher growth path—and keeping it there for the long term—should be first and foremost on the development agenda.

The country's disappointing performance in poverty reduction mirrors its growth performance. This is not unexpected. Every country that has chalked up significant achievements in poverty reduction and human development has also done quite well in securing long-term economic growth. Such a correlation is expected: economic growth is an essential condition for generating the resources needed to sustain investments in health, education, infrastructure, and good governance (law enforcement, regulation, etc.).

That achieving economic growth should be in the forefront of the policy agenda does not imply that nothing else can be done to lick the poverty problem. On the contrary, cursory evidence indicates that much can be done to enhance the poverty-reducing effects of growth.

Introduction

The importance of infrastructure for developing countries cannot be overstated—it is a major driver for growth and poverty reduction. For example, the lack of adequate transport, water, and energy facilities can adversely affect the development of existing industries and may preclude new entrants. An efficient transport and communication infrastructure provides overall mobility for goods and people alike, contributes to reducing input and transaction costs, and enhances the efficiency of markets. Local infrastructure, which may have significant spillover effects, spurs local economic activities while the network characteristics of infrastructure enhance the connectivity of regions and promote domestic integration. The key role of infrastructure in economic growth cannot be overstated. A recent joint study substantiates the decisive role that infrastructure has played in growth and poverty reduction in East Asia and the Pacific (ADB, JBIC, and World Bank 2005).

This chapter takes off from sources-of-growth studies in which application of the growth diagnostic framework points to the possibility that inadequate infrastructure is constraining economic growth. This chapter analyzes specific factors responsible for the lack of infrastructure and then provides policy recommendations to help overcome those constraints. It attempts to provide an empirical basis for the often-claimed key role of infrastructure in fostering economic growth. Thus, the chapter investigates whether poor infrastructure acts as a binding constraint to economic growth. The basis for the popular claim that infrastructure matters to economic growth seems to be anecdotal and founded more on conviction than on empirical analysis.

The theory of capital movements has not been treated systematically, so far, in the literature of economics. The reason for this neglect may well be found largely in the fact that the classical doctrine of international trade, the theory of comparative costs, rests on the fundamental assumption that while the factors of production, labor and capital, are freely mobile inside a given country, they are lacking external freedom of mobility. This basic premise of the international immobility of capital seems to have prevented the possibility of a theoretical approach to capital movements, at least from the standpoint of international trade theory. It is significant that whenever the so-called problem of transfers comes up in the orthodox theory of international trade, the discussion is always concerned with indemnity payments between governments and matters of this kind, never with spontaneous, economic money transfers, i.e., with capital movements in the strict sense.

Secondly, the theory of capital movements undoubtedly suffers from the fact that the transfer problem, which arises in capital movements as well as in indemnity payments, has taken up far too much room at the center of the stage. No attempt has been made to look beyond it, either at the causes of capital movements or at their effects. The discussion has been limited to the immediate process of international transfers, in the belief that practical and theoretical problems could be seen here which actually have turned out to be largely spurious.

Born in a small town in Austro–Hungary into a poor Jewish family, Vambery distanced himself from his Jewish origins but not before acquiring a command of the Hebrew bible and the Talmud (Kramer 1999: 9). Excelling at languages, he left for Istanbul in 1857 where he earned his livelihood as a language teacher. After ‘several years’ residence in Turkish houses, and frequent visits to Islamic schools and libraries', he was ‘transformed into a Turk – nay into an Efendi’, as he claimed later in his introduction to Travels in Central Asia (1864). His journey to the East was stimulated, so he tells us, from a desire to prove his hunch that Hungarian was connected to the Turko–Tartaric language branch. In the guise of a Turkish gentleman he arrived in Tehran in July 1862 where he presented himself at the Turkish, French and British consulates. Finding his onward journey forestalled owing to the situation in Afghanistan, he spent the next six months in Persia. Eventually meeting a party of simple Tartar–Chinese pilgrims returning to their homeland, he decided to accompany them in the guise of a dervish. Sometimes placed in great peril, throughout his travels – which took him to Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand – he was stalked by fear of his disguise being penetrated. At the court of Herat the young ruler took him for an Englishman and the rumour rapidly spread to the bazaar.

Apart from the desultory action in German East Africa, Britain was involved in three subsidiary campaigns in the east when Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916: Mesopotamia, the Balkans and Egypt. Of the three eastern theaters, Mesopotamia was the most badly managed and the most inhospitable. After the surrender of a British-led army (made up largely of Indian troops) at Kut in April 1916, direction of the front passed from the military authorities in Delhi to the War Office. Robertson, despite his hatred of sideshows, understood that for the sake of Britain's prestige and the security of India, a withdrawal was out of the question. But he wanted operations conducted at minimal costs so that troops would not be diverted from Haig's army in large numbers. Under his stewardship there was a dramatic improvement in communications, supplies and administration as well as an increase in forces. In the second week in December 1916 Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, the British commander, was authorized to organize an advance, though no grand objectives were set. By then Maude had received reinforcements to the point where he held an advantage of roughly three to one in manpower (150,000 as against 48,000) over the Turks and possessed far more artillery. He began a slow, methodical advance and over the course of the next three months, ejected the Turks from their positions along the Tigris, culminating in the recovery of Kut on February 24, 1917. The remnant of the defeated army fled in disorder toward Baghdad.

Historical Background

The interventions of Christian powers in Islamic lands, starting with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British counter-attack of 1799–1802, had a profound psychological effect on Muslim states as far a field as Persia. Ottoman decline had been in evidence since the eighteenth century: military reverses and economic stagnation had reduced her territory and made her vulnerable to the expansive European powers, most importantly Russia. Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of this period had become for Europeans the problematic core of the ‘Eastern Question’ and would remain so for the rest of the nineteenth century. Attempts at reform by successive Ottoman Sultans seemed to most European outsiders only a staving of inevitable collapse. In 1807 Selim III was deposed and later murdered after the Janissaries – who with the ulama formed a bastion of reaction – rose to resist his military reorganization. Mahmud II eventually managed to destroy the Janissaries in 1826 and to institute wholesale reform of the army, but not before Serbia had won autonomy (1813) and Greece her independence (1830). Another potentially critical secession was forestalled in Albania by a massacre of dissident pashas and their supporters in 1830. Ottoman weaknesses had contributed to the rise of a rival power in Egypt, which the Albanian Muhammad Ali took over in 1805. Though nominally under Turkish suzerainty, the armies of the Egyptian pasha expanded into the Hijaz and Central Arabia, and under the command of Muhammad Ali's son Ibrahim completed the occupation of Syria in 1833.

Journalist and feminist, Grace Ellison was a strong Turkophile who publicized the cause of Turkish women in newspaper articles written from within ‘a Turkish harem’. She met Zeyneb Hanim, daughter of a government minister, in Istanbul in 1905. Zeyneb and her sister Melek had organised dinners in their home to discuss women's rights until forbidden by the government. The restless sisters then wrote to the French author Pierre Loti, who met them clandestinely and incorporated their stories into his sentimental novel, Les Désenchantées. Subsequently, Ellison visited the sisters in Paris where they had fled in fear of their lives. Together with Zeyneb she co-authored A Turkish Woman's European Impressions (1913). In the introduction Ellison wrote: ‘I, who through the veil have studied the aimless, unhealthy existences of these pampered women, am nevertheless convinced that the civilization of Western Europe for Turkish women is a case of exchanging the frying-pan for the fire.’ In An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915), published in The Daily Telegraph in the form of ‘letters home’, she described the sequestered day-to-day existence she led in the house of another Turkish friend, Makboulé Hanim, who she called Fatima. Ellison took pains to deconstruct the misconceptions of her fellow countrymen about the lives of Eastern women – she wrote she had been told not to use the word ‘harem’ in a public lecture because it might raise audience expectation of ‘improper revelations’. Nevertheless, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem retains the word in its title and includes a photograph of the author as a veiled Turkish woman.

Setting and Purpose of Study

East and South Asia include some of the world's most dynamic open economies as well as several least developed countries. This study examines the diverse experience of regional integration of a sample of South and East Asian economies. Using a set of country cases based on a similar framework, the study addresses an important policy question: how can each country's integration with its neighbors and more distant regional economies be improved? Of the eight country studies, five are from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and three are from East Asia (the People's Republic of China [PRC], Thailand, and Singapore). The country cases–which differ by per capita income, economic growth rate, country size, and location–provide fascinating insights into the relationship between regional economic performance and strategies for regional integration at country level. The study also offers lessons for other countries and subregions which are interested in developing national strategies to foster pan-Asian integration. As the next section shows, relations between South and East Asian economies have evolved considerably since pre-colonial times. The country cases focus on the period since 1990, as this period marks the beginning of strengthening integration between South and East Asian economies. The global economic crisis is expected to have a temporary, short-term negative impact on the process of South Asia-East Asia integration. Once global economic recovery commences, the pace of South Asia-East Asia integration is expected to pick up.

Daughter of radical parents who were close friends of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and the Carlyles, Lucie Austin was perhaps destined to follow the career path of her mother Sarah as a translator of German literature, having as a child travelled in Germany and lived for a period in France. Her marriage with minor aristocrat Alexander Duff Gordon in 1840 brought love and entry into fashionable social and literary circles if little money. However, nearly twenty years into her marriage and after having given birth to three children, Lucie discovered she had tuberculosis. In summer 1861 she set sail for South Africa, unaware that her exile ‘would be the bridge to a different kind of wholeness, the route to another identity’ (Frank 1994: 206). In the summer of 1862 she returned briefly to England but soon left for warmer climes, eventually arriving in Egypt in the autumn. She would live there until her death in 1869. There she acquired a new Egyptian household, led by her personal assistant, guide and translator Omar, which substituted her English one. Except for her married, eldest daughter Janet, who for a while came out to Alexandria, she thereafter rarely saw any of her own family. Published a year afterLetters from the Cape (1864), Letters from Egypt ‘ran through three imprints in the first year’ (Searight 1983: xii). They coincided with and helped feed a burgeoning British fascination with Egypt, and even led to their infirm author having to fend off trophy hunters from her home in Luxor in Upper Egypt (ibid, xvi).

Newspapers favorable to the army, such as the Globe and Morning Post, continued to be a thorn in the government's side, holding it, not the generals, responsible for the German breakthrough. The daily pummeling of Lloyd George by a section of the press had its echo in parliament. On April 9 Lloyd George addressed the House of Commons and in the course of rebutting charges that he had deliberately kept Haig short of reserves, made several incorrect statements. He declared that in spite of heavy casualties in 1917, the British army in France was “considerably stronger” on January 1, 1918 than it had been twelve months earlier. The allegation is misleading. It can be justified only if Lloyd George had included noncombatants such as labor battalions. The prime minister also denied that he had large British forces locked in secondary theaters, forces that would have been more useful fighting the Germans in France. He claimed that there was only one white division in Mesopotamia, and in Egypt and Palestine there were only three white divisions; the rest were either Indians or mixed, with a very small proportion of white troops. Here, what Lloyd George said was clearly untrue. In Palestine alone, Allenby had eleven divisions, consisting of about 100,000 white and only 6,000 Indian soldiers.

Daughter of Stephen Woulfe, chief baron of the Irish Exchequer, Mary became the second wife of Lieutenant–Colonel (later Sir) Justin Sheil in 1849. She went with him to Persia where he had been serving in the British legation since 1836 (he was minister from 1844 to 1853) and where she bore him three children. Lady Sheil published Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia in 1856, and it has been designated the first travel book on the country by a woman. Her narrative of the deposition and murder of Nasir al-Din's first Prime Minister, Amir Kabir Mirza Taqi Khan, is used as a primary source for this incident by Abbas Amanat in his biography of the Shah, Pivot of the Universe (Amanat 1997). An observant writer on her own account, she made full (sometimes verbatim) use of her husband's dispatches, especially with regard to the section in her book on the Babi movement which provides one of the earliest published accounts on the sect by a European.

From:

Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (1856)

Lady Sheil's account of Babism explains this manifestation of acute social and religious unrest in Qajar Persia as the work of socialists, communists and anarchists, ‘the opinion shared by almost all of the European colony in Tihran in 1850–52’ (Momen 1981: 5).

Andrei Platonov's novel Happy Moscow (Schastlivaia Moskva) was long in the writing: from 1932 his notebooks were to be filled with fitful ideas of plot and characterisation for a work that was to obsess him for several more years, and in 1933, he finished the first six chapters. What we now know as Happy Moscow may, in fact, have been intended as part of a longer work, Journey from Leningrad to Moscow in 1937 (Puteshestvie iz Leningrada v Moskvu v 1937 godu), yet despite contracts with leading publishers, he never fulfilled his plans; in the end, only the second chapter of Happy Moscow was published, in the form of a short story. Whether the novel's ambitious conception was ultimately beyond realisation (unlikely from the author of Chevengur (Chevengur)), whether other projects (such as Takyr (Takyr) and Soul (Dzhan), the works relating to Platonov's visits to Turkmenistan in 1934 and 1935) took priority, or whether aesthetic considerations rendered the work obsolete and even dangerous (the stories collected in the 1937 volume The River Potudan (Reka Potudan') are altogether more deferential to Socialist Realism), by the time Platonov's son was arrested in 1938, work on the novel had been resolutely abandoned. Eventually published for the first time only in 1991, Happy Moscow has since become one of Platonov's most commented-upon works.

Economic Structure and External Orientation

Pakistan, like many other developing economies, is actively pursuing a policy of enhancing regional economic cooperation. Of particular interest to Pakistan are the South and East Asian economies. Pakistan is a signatory to the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA), which came into force in July 2006. Pakistan developed its Strategic Vision East Asia initiative in 2003, which aims to stimulate trade and investment ties with South and East Asia. These ties are currently weak but have considerable potential for growth.

In view of the growing trend toward regionalism, it is imperative for Pakistan to solidify its economic relations especially with the South Asian and East Asian countries. The South Asian developing economies are opening up with a view to accelerating their economic growth through greater trade and investment. Against this backdrop, this country paper provides a comprehensive review of economic structure in Pakistan with particular emphasis on trade, investment, and potential for regional cooperation. The rest of this chapter reviews the economic structure and external orientation of Pakistan's economy. This paper (i) discusses Pakistan's foreign direct investment (FDI) regime and policies; (ii) discusses and analyses merchandise trade policies with emphasis on East and South Asia; (iii) highlights infrastructure and trade administration issues; (iv) describes the service sector trade; and (v) concludes the discussion and spells out some policy implications.

1

Soviet ‘Great Style’ is primarily associated with the ‘grand’ genre forms. In painting, this means ceremonial portraits and battle scenes; in music, it means opera, oratorios, cantatas, symphonies; in city planning, architectural complexes; in prose, novels; and in poetry, the epic poem. As a sort of narrative in verse, the epic poem, like operas and programmatic music, was narrative in form, and the connection to heroic style made it the embodiment of ‘epic thinking’, and made it especially close to the Socialist Realist aesthetic-much closer than lyric poetry, and it was no coincidence that the first glimmers of the thaw in Soviet literature were connected precisely to the ‘discussion about lyric poetry’. The genre hierarchy in Stalinism can infallibly be reconstructed according to the preferences in awarding the Stalin Prizes (Stalin, as is well known, personally participated in distributing these prizes). Thus, in the period spanning 1934 to 1952, there was not a single year in which a Stalin Prize for poetry was not conferred on an epic poem (the others were for poem cycles, anthologies of poetry, lyrics of popular songs, and translations of poetry).

Arun Kumar Das Gupta was born in Kolkata on 14 June 1932. After attending the Scottish Church Collegiate School, he proceeded to Presidency College, Kolkata, and graduated with first class Honours in English in 1951. As an exceptionally gifted and committed student, protégé of the legendary Professor Tarak Nath Sen, he had already made his entrée into the academic circle that would virtually be identified with him one day.

After passing through Calcutta University and Wadham College, Oxford, the young Arun Kumar took up employment under the West Bengal Government and was sent to teach English at the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur. But he soon found his way to Presidency College, to start a career matched by few others even in that venerable institution.

For Presidency, it was the best of all times that soon became the worst of all times. Never, perhaps, had it boasted more august faculty, greater social recognition or, as the future would show, a more brilliant body of students. It was a lively, dedicated, empowering, but demanding, exclusive, even forbidding world. This may not be unrelated to the turmoil that descended on it from the mid-1960s, when it became a seed-bed of violent leftist politics. The Naxalite movement was itself the outcome of decades of unrest and deprivation, whose epicentre was the partition of Bengal at the time of India's independence.

This history is germane to an account of Professor Das Gupta's career, as it meant he had to reorient his approach to literature and his identity as an academic.

Enemies of the early modern theatre never tired of recalling that the Greeks called stage actors hypocrites. One especially truculent reminder came from Isaac Bargrave, chaplain to Prince Charles and pastor of St Margaret's at Westminster. In A Sermon against Selfe Policy, Preached at Whitehall in Lent 1621, Bargrave declared:

Radical Protestant polemics of early modern England routinely likened the hypocrisy of stage players to the mummery of the Catholic priest, the disguises and forged miracles of the Jesuit, and the Machiavellian dissimulation of the politic Spaniard. It was even suggested in one pamphlet that the Jesuits' investment in hypocrisy did not make market sense. This was John Gee in New Shreds of the Old Snare (1624):