The September 11 terrorist attacks ignited global interest in the Middle East. Observers in the region and abroad were quick to highlight the development "deficits" in Middle Eastern countries which have been linked to everything from structural economic imbalances to deficient political...

With all the talk in Europe about Islam and Muslim culture it is surprising how little hard-core empirical evidence exists on the compatibility of Muslim culture with positive patterns of political, social, and ecological development in the world system in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. This...

Media-industry is an important sector for any region, mostly because of its significant contribution for the socio-economic development. Regional ‘media industry’ is known more as socio-cultural change agent than a ‘business enterprise’. Present paper takes a look at history and growth...

Uzbekistan has been difficult to classify among the thirty-plus economies in transition during the 1990s and has posed a puzzle, because it is a slow reformer but relatively good performer. This paper argues that there is no simple Uzbek model. Uzbekistan?s economic reform process has been...

Afghanistan's economic problems are often assumed to stem solely from the internal warfare that began in 1978. Is this assumption correct? I consider this question by comparing Afghanistan from 1961 to 2006 with Pakistan (a neighboring country with a similarly low level of development in the...

Based on the variable rate of gross domestic product per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan, and Korea: M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (à la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...

Based on the variable rate of GDP per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan and South Korean: M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (a la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...

This paper considers the contribution of the developmental state literature to comparative historical analysis, with a particular emphasis on methodological issues: the role of single and comparative case studies, counter-factual analysis, the nature of historical explanation and the...

The post-war experience of developing countries leads to two depressing conclusions: only a small number of countries have successfully developed; and development theory has not produced development. In this article we examine one critical fact that might provide insights into the development...

The purpose of this paper is to set the issue of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia in two contexts: the changing geography of economic growth and patterns of trade and investment across the world as a whole, and the accompanying quiet revolution that has taken place in the international...