The WTO’s new Agreement on Trade Facilitation (ATF) will help to reverse the region’s deceleration of overall export growth and, when implemented, could add as much as 3 percent to regional GDP and lift employment across the region by 1.2 percent. In the region’s developing economies,...

Searching for sustainable regional trade agreements (RTAs) for East Asia, we quantitatively evaluated the likely impact of proposed East Asian RTA strategies─(i) the AFTA (a being-left-alone strategy), (ii) an ASEAN Hub RTA (a hub-and-spoke type of overlapping RTA strategy), (iii) the AFTA vs...

Is justice individualistic or both individualistic andsocial? Opposite views on this question include von Hayek, who said that `social justice' was an oxymoron, and the late Holy Father who, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis said that some socio-economic institutions can have`structures of sin' in...

In this paper, which was delivered as the V.V. Giri Memorial Lecture at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Indian Society of Labour Economics (IJLE), the author presents a vision for building a humane and just society in which the rights of working people are heard and respected. He argues that this...

Rawls and Wresinski are both concerned about the poor, but their approaches regarding what is needed to achieve social justice are very different. This paper focuses on the issue of the knowledge and motivation necessary to fight poverty. We suggest that the Wresinski approach advocating an...

Why Islamic tradition in Morocco and Indonesia is different? Why Islamic patterns in urban communities such as Jakarta different with Islamic patterns of rural communities? Variation in Islam is an interesting challenge to be answered. Islam, even in aspects substance, namely spirituality, is...

This paper examines whether education empowers women. We exploit an exogenous variation in education induced by a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We find education reduces the number of live births, increases contraceptive use, and...

This is a keynote address at the ASEAN-SEAFDEC conference on Sustainable Fisheries for Food Security Towards 2020, Fish for the People 2020: Adaptation to a Changing Environment. It addresses theme one of the conference which is Enhancing Governance in Fisheries Management. With the...

This paper addresses the question how knowledge is used to benefit the economic development of Singapore and Malaysia. Both countries have followed strict science policies to establish knowledge governance regimes for a knowledge-based economy. On the basis of empirical studies in both countries...

This paper uses multivariate regression analysis to explore the time and birth cohort trends of women’s empowerment in eight countries of South Asia and South East Asia. The measures of women’s empowerment are: economic participation, educational attainment, wage work, fertility, female to...