The impact of the ACFTA on ASEAN–PRC trade: estimates based on an extended gravity model for component trade

This article uses an extended gravity model to examine the impact of the free trade agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on their trade flows and patterns. New determinants are utilized to capture the growing importance of global production sharing and intraregional trade in parts and components in East Asia. We show that the free trade agreement leads to substantially higher and more pronounced bilateral trade flows between ASEAN and the PRC than what a conventional gravity model predicts and the increase is concentrated in ASEAN countries that have stronger industrial linkages with the PRC.     

Using participatory rural appraisal and participatory research and extension in a post-independence environment: a case from East Timor

A participatory rural appraisal (PRA) conducted in East Timor in 2004 as part of an agricultural development project provided the basis for a number of community-based participatory extension initiatives. The PRA involved several communities throughout a watershed and also served as a training exercise for local agriculture ministry staff. Despite the poverty of many of the communities involved, and in contrast to published literature on the local agricultural situation, farmers clearly expressed their need for more marketable crops and alternative sources of livelihoods. Their desires contrasted with the project's initial assumption that the major need was for increased production of staple crops to alleviate food scarcity. The project consequently branched out from concentrating on basic agronomy of staple crops into developing marketable crops, improving livestock production and facilitating development of a local business. Farmers' groups were set up to allow farmers to develop their own agricultural enterprises. Some ministry staff who participated in the project welcomed the opportunity to move from the traditional authoritarian extension system set up under Indonesian colonial rule to a more collegial and educational system. The breakdown of institutions and lines of authority following independence may create new opportunities for participatory development in newly independent states.     

东亚汇率选择与“人民币集团”的形成

本文研究了最近10年东南亚国家的汇率政策和汇率变动趋势,并且估算了东南亚国家货币篮子中的主要货币的权重。结果显示,在东南亚国家的汇率政策调整中,人民币已经变得比美元更加重要。这主要是由东南亚国家自身的偏好决定的,而其偏好则取决于国内政治经济关系及其在国际贸易体系中的地位。     

美国经济衰退对东南亚国家的影响

美国经济衰退给世界经济带来许多不确定因素,也给东南亚经济蒙上一层阴影。美国经济虽然是影响东南亚经济的一个重要因素,但已经不是唯一的因素,东南亚各国正在积极面对,努力摆脱美国经济衰退带来的影响,促进本地区和各国经济的发展。     

Workers of the Internet unite? Online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six Asian and African countries

This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform.     

Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global

Corruption is regularly treated as a barrier to infrastructure, development and growth. However, in Saigon, corruption itself has become an infrastructure in Vietnam's late-socialist urban transformation. This infrastructure facilitates not only growth in the form of transnational investment, property speculation and construction, but allows for different kinds of planning and development practice as well. Perceptions about corruption in Vietnam, and in Saigon specifically, shape market and planning practices that structure the terms on which interested parties from abroad and internally speculate upon and ultimately develop urban projects. This is not a static formulation of corruption. Rather, corruption and the various political and policy responses to it constantly shape how brokers, developers and financiers renegotiate how the city becomes a knowable object for investment, legible to the calculations of both risk and reward used by global investors as well as to those who enact the embedded bureaucratic, legal and political practices that create Saigon's built environment. In this article I argue that different definitions and policy responses to corruption in effect create variable ways of seeing the city (as well as modes of being seen) that have an impact on the material realities of the metropolis—the types of connections produced with transnational finance, the legal and regulatory structure under which urbanization unfolds, and the types of players, firms and officials involved.     

Fiscal decentralization in Indonesia: A comment on smoke and lewis

In World Development Smoke and Lewis (1996) describe a local government capability rating effort in Indonesia, and conclude that this approach to decentralization has great potential. Their analysis is bound to a limited set of central level actors, and thus reflects only part of the decentralization debate in Indonesia. Consequently the authors miss the roots of this purportedly “new” approach and overestimate its actual or possible effects. Smoke and Lewis have also not taken into account the importance of a vastly different approach to decentralization, the regional autonomy pilot program, which was inaugurated by the Indonesian Government in April 1995. Providing the broader context to the rating effort, we try to reveal its conceptual and practical limitations and point on the ambiguous role of the rating effort in the decentralization arena in Indonesia.