In all the regions of the contemporary world - including Asia - there is a growing trend in market consolidation through regional collaboration in the form of bilateral and regional trade agreements. Regional cooperation and integration can facilitate the way for expanding markets and creating...

Services have been a key driver of overall economic growth in South Asia since the 1990s. This paper examines how the growth of services output, trade and investment have affected service sector employment in South Asia and the extent to which countries in this region are proactively undertaking...

This paper draws on recent field work within South Asia and an extensive review of secondary data to examine the dynamics of cross border trade and investment in South Asia, exploring the potential for, and obstacles to, such trade through the lens of a sector that is salient throughout South...

The slow progress and modest achievements of regional integration in South Asia have generated a huge amount of skepticism about its role as an effective strategy of growth. The present study, however, argues that there is need to forge deeper integration within the region. It examines the...

This study attempts to address the issue of declining labour intensity in India's organized manufacturing in order to understand the constraints on employment generation in the labour intensive sectors. Using primary survey data covering 252 labour intensive manufacturing-exporting firms across...

Food security is defined as economic access to food along with food production and food availability. Agriculture in the SAR (South Asian Region) is caught in a low equilibrium trap with low productivity of staples, supply shortfalls, high prices, low returns to farmers and area diversification...

The growing urbanization of poverty poses a significant challenge to governments and donors alike, particularly in Asia, which houses 60 per cent of the world's slum dwellers. Donors have been slow to respond to the urban challenge, however, both in their funding patterns and their priorities....

The Orient/East-Med Corridor, connecting central and southeastern Europe, provides important business potential for European rail freight. However, freight transport by rail faces a number of challenges in terms of quality, cost competitiveness, service features and political/societal acceptance...