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Cross-Border Collaborative Degree Programs in East Asia:Expectations and Challenges
Get PDFThis paper sheds light on the increasingly diverse forms of cross-border higher education in East Asia, ranging from traditional student mobility (e.g., full-time study abroad) to the mobility of the programs themselves. Specifically, this paper examines the expected outcomes and risks or challenges of cross-border collaborative degree programs by focusing on differences in the level of collaboration and by using two survey datasets on leading East Asian universities and their collaborative degree programs. As for the expected outcomes of such programs, this survey of universities indicates that improving the quality of education is perceived as a more important outcome of collaborative degree programs than it is for traditional forms of simple student mobility. However, this survey of programs confirms the variation in the degree of collaboration among collaborative programs in terms of location, curriculum and degree provision; it also shows that bilateral programs, which require greater collaboration between the partner institutions, tend to perceive promoting intercultural awareness, achieving research excellence and promoting regional collaboration and Asian identity as more important than one-side led programs do. Bilateral programs also see economic benefits in collaborative degree programs, such as meeting the demands of the global economy, when the data samples used for the analysis are limited to programs conducted between institutions from high-income and middle-income countries, thus excluding programs with low-income countries. On the other hand, the risks and challenges of cross-border collaborative degree programs tend to be perceived as less significant by bilateral programs than by one-side led programs. These results point to the importance of the greater involvement of each of the partner institutions in meeting the expectations of the other partner and mitigating any risks or challenges in cross-border degree programs. In particular, it is worth considering such increasingly higher levels of collaboration as each country in the partnership develops its economy and higher education institutions.research repor
Unraveling the Enigma of East Asian Economic Resiliency:The Case of Taiwan
Get PDFTaiwan was one of the few Asian economies that had emerged from the 1997-1998 East Asian financial crisis relatively unscathed. During the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the island’s shock-absorbing capability turned out to be once more quite respectable. Taiwan inherited a relatively healthy state of financial systems prior to the sub-prime loan crisis and built up a huge foreign reserve. Also foreign banks’ participation in domestic loan market was quite limited. The state dominated the banking sector and closely supervised its lending policy and balance sheet. The island’s macro-economic fundamentals were quite healthy and the government still enjoyed spare fiscal capacity to borrow and spend. Many elements that define Taiwan’s economic resilience have been fostered by some entrenched institutional arrangements and established policy orientations over a long time. Taiwan managed to retain the bulk of these long-running sources of economic resilience despite of the tremendous external pressures by neo-liberal policy advocates to dismantle these “out-dated” policy thinking and practices. Furthermore, despite of the political turmoil after the first power rotation of 2000, the legacy of an independent and proactive central bank, whose reputation and credibility had been strengthened by its record of steering the island safely through the financial crisis as well as the Strait missile crisis, was kept intact. The legacy of prudential financial regulation was also largely kept intact with the concentration of regulatory authority in a new cabinet-level supervisory commission. Taiwan was able to cope with the 2008-09 global financial crisis thanks also to a more enabling regional environment. The political backlash against IMF-imposed austerity measures precipitated a growing awakening among East Asian policy thinkers. Most developing countries in the region have insured themselves through managing exchange rates and building huge currency reserves, so that they could be protected against the tempests of currency speculation and never again would have to call on the IMF. The ideological milieu and the cooperative institutional arrangements in East Asia have changed so much between the two crises.research repor
Ethnic Networks and Technical Knowledge Learning in Industrial Clusters
Get PDFUsing an enterprise-level dataset collected from 234 workshops located in the furniture cluster of the city of Arusha, Tanzania, this paper investigates the mechanisms of technical knowledge exchange that take place in clusters. A knowledge exchange link is defined as any two clustering entrepreneurs who perform similar manufacturing techniques in the production process. The results show that the strength of the ethnic networks of producers has positive effects on acquisition of manufacturing techniques, particularly in skills such as wood-joining, which are mainly influenced by a producer’s own skills rather than production facilities. Using dyadic data analysis, this paper further finds that two producers from the same ethnic minority are more likely to exhibit the same manufacturing techniques compared with two producers from the same ethnic majority. These findings suggest that ethnic networks facilitate knowledge exchange in an industrial cluster, but that this positive externality of the ethnic network effect only takes place in small-sized ethnic groups, and only to the extent that sophisticated facilities are not essential in the knowledge learning processes.research repor
Success as Trap? Crisis Response And Challenges To Economic Upgrading in Export-Oriented Southeast Asia
Get PDFThis paper explores the capacities for sustained growth in the export-oriented countries of Southeast Asia, with a focus on Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. The paper is especially concerned with the prospects for "upgrading" and moving beyond the "middle-income trap" in Malaysia and Thailand. But the core argument for all three countries is similar: Each has responded relatively well to economic crises with impressive reforms, especially in areas of property rights, macroeconomic policies, and, to varying degrees, financial supervision. With some exceptions, however, reforms have not extended to improving local (indigenous) competitiveness and technological capacities. These limits reflect both successful adjustment in areas noted earlier and the availability of resources, including commodity export revenues, external aid, and migrant / informal labor. The danger is that such "safety valves" will serve to reinforce existing institutional and political arrangements, thus undermining initiatives to improve local competitiveness and linkages so key to upgrading. Of particular interest is the fact that, unlike Western European countries where external exposure and vulnerability have led to various forms of labor incorporation, and unlike in the East Asian NICs, where such vulnerability has led at least to a commitment to shared prosperity (and in Singapore to a peak union's participation in labor market and productivity decisions), labor has remained largely disorganized and excluded from bargaining over key issues in export-oriented Southeast Asia. This argument in turn reflects the contention that crises vary in nature and intensity, that different crises have different impacts on the willingness and capacity of political elites to promote new coalitions and to foster new forms of coordination (i.e. institutions), and that such institutions are especially important for movement into more innovation-based activities and higher income status.research repor
Regional Integration in East Africa Diversity or Economic Conformity
Get PDFThe present paper examines the economic rationale for regional economic integration, such as a common market and currency union, in the East African Community (EAC). For that purpose, I examined the degree of regional economic interdependence in terms of trade, macroeconomic indicators, and real disturbances (IS shocks) in the EAC. First, I used the trade intensity indices (TTI) to examine whether the degree of trade interdependence in East Africa is higher or lower than that in other regions (e.g., Asia), and whether the region’s economic interdependence has deepened since the reformation of the EAC in 2000. Surprisingly, the interdependence in terms of trade in Africa is very strong, much stronger than that in Asian countries. Second, I investigated whether the macroeconomic links among the East African economies are strong and whether they became tighter in the 1990s. Relying on the principal component analysis, I have found that the degree of confluence in macroeconomic variables, such as inflation, growth, and exchange rates, is high in East Africa, although I did not observe a clear trend of increases. Third, relying on the theory of the optimum currency area, I examined the prospects for currency unification in the EAC. For that purpose, I examined the degree of synchronization of real disturbances (IS shocks) among EAC countries, and compared it with that among Asian countries. By applying the principal component analysis on IS shocks in each country, I found that the EAC countries face similar real disturbances. This suggests that the need for independent monetary policy is less than otherwise, and therefore the EAC is a good candidate for the optimal currency area. All these findings suggest that there is a strong case for a common market and currency union in the EAC.research repor
Modes of Collective Action in Village Economies:Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in a Developing Country
Get PDFIn a canonical model of collective action, individual contribution to collective action is negatively correlated with group size. Empirical evidence on the group size effect has been mixed, partly due to heterogeneities in group activities. In this paper, we first construct a simple general model of collective action with the free-riding problem, altruism, public goods, and positive externalities of social networks. We then empirically test the theoretical implications of group size effect on individual contribution to four different types of collective action, i.e., monetary or nonmonetary contribution to directly or indirectly productive activities. To achieve this, we collect and employ artefactual field experimental data such as public goods and dictator games conducted in southern Sri Lanka under a natural experimental situation where the majority of farmers were relocated to randomly selected communities based on the government lottery. This unique situation enables us to identify the causal effects of community size on collective action. We find that the levels of collective action can be explained by the social preferences of farmers; we show evidence on the free-riding by self-interested households with no land holdings. The pattern of collective action, however, differs significantly by the mode of activities; the collective action which is directly related to production is less likely to suffer from the free rider problem than from indirectly productive activities. Finally, the monetary contribution is less likely to cause the free riding than the non-monetary contribution.research repor
