The September 2007 annual summit of APEC to be hosted by Australia will witness the ending of the decade long moratorium on membership. A major anomaly of the APEC is that while the three largest economies in the world in terms of PPP GDP are members (US, China and Japan), the fourth largest...

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) will be an integral and significant part of global financial and capital markets even in the medium term. It is important for India to put in place domestic safeguards against the investments by the SWF in order to retain technological and policy autonomy, and...

Financial and economic literacy is essential for understanding forces that are driving social change in India, and globally. It is also an essential contributing factor in determining employability and in designing and delivering public services. India needs to establish widely accessible...

As India continues to pursue calibrated globalisation and expand external linkages, this is an opportune time to develop robust economic partnership with Taiwan, an economy with a GDP of over US$300billion and a per capita income of US $14,000.

A regulator should promote social entrepreneurship and tap into the considerable expertise existing in the micro-finance sector. The aim should be to lower transaction costs and generate savings in real resource costs to the economy in delivering micro-finance services in a sustainable manner....

Singapore’s 2007 budget reaffirms government’s determination to continue with the current globalization strategy of high growth, high net in-migration and minimal social risk pooling in financing old age, and healthcare.[ For Budget Speech and highlights, see under Singapore...

There are several themes which emerge from the comparative analysis of social security systems in Southeast Asia. Each country will need to address the limitations of their respective system in relation to each of the themes outlined. The first theme concerns the need for a multi-tier social...

The paper has argued that to expand coverage of micro-pensions, social entrepreneurship (along with social responsibility) will be needed by the financial sector, including the MFIs, insurance companies and mutual funds. Such entrepreneurship should aim to drastically reduce overall transaction...

Consistent with international trends, the role of a Defined Contribution (DC) schemes is expected to grow substantially in India. The payout phase of DC schemes has received relatively less attention than the accumulation phase. Key risks to be addressed are the longevity and inflation risks,...

The main objective of the paper is to explore the role of Japan in the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral and Technical Cooperation (BIMSTEC). The analysis suggests that BIMSTEC-Japan cooperation could made a modest contribution to Asian integration. But this is contingent upon domestic...