East-West Center: Featured Publications

Higher Education in Asia/Pacific: Quality and the Public Good

The past two decades have witnessed a vast expansion of higher education in the Asia/Pacific with education universally accepted as a necessary condition of economic growth. Countries throughout the region have rapidly expanded access to higher education, often by loosening restrictions on the private sector to stimulate its provision. In the process, the status of higher education has shifted from a widely accepted public good to a commodity provided and purchased through market mechanisms....

Crossing Borders, Changing Landscapes: Land-Use Dynamics in the Golden Triangle

Over the last half-century, public policy has affected land-use practices across the borders linking China, Thailand, and Laos. Political and economic reforms have facilitated labor mobility and a shift in agricultural practices away from staple grains and toward a diverse array of cash crops, rubber being one of the foremost. China has promoted the conversion of forests to rubber agroforestry in southern Yunnan--profitable for farmers, but a concern in terms of biodiversity and long-term...

Farming with Fire and Water: The Human Ecology of a Composite Swiddening Community in Vietnam's Northern Mountains

Winner of the Silver Prize Vietnamese Publishers Association annual national book awards Of approximately 26,000 titles published in 2009, the Vietnamese version of Farming with Fire and Water: The Human Ecology of a Composite Swiddening Community in Vietnam's Northern Mountains, edited by Tran Duc Vien, A. Terry Rambo, and Nguyen Thanh Lam, received the silver (second) prize in the Vietnamese Publishers Association annual national book awards. Farming with Fire and Water presents a detailed...

U.S.-Burma Relations: quot;Pragmatic Engagementquot; Greets quot;Discipline-Flourishing Democracyquot;

On November 3, 2009, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell became the highest ranking American official to travel to Myanmar since the 1995 visit of then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright. To reinforce this message of outreach, President Obama later engaged Prime Minister Thein Sein on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit meeting in Singapore. The initiative to pragmatically engage the ruling...

The Global Economic Crisis and Implications for the Asia Pacific Region

The Senior Policy Seminar is a keystone event in the East-West Center's annual calendar. The 2009 seminar, tenth in the series, brought together senior foreign policy officials, private sector leaders, and analysts from countries around the region for nonofficial, frank, and non-attribution discussions of security issues in the Asia Pacific region. The 2009 Senior Policy Seminar focused on quot;The Global Economic Crisis and Implications for the Asia Pacific Region.quot; Participants discussed...

How the Asia Pacific Can Drive the Global Recovery

The transition to a new, sustained global growth path is still precarious and will require concerted policy actions by many countries. Leadership by the G-20 will be essential for coordinating the global effort. But due to the central importance of the Asia Pacific in the world economy, regional institutions such as ASEAN+3, ASEAN+6, and APEC could also play large roles in the next phase of the recovery. Interdependence in the Asia Pacific region is now often seen as a source of risk,...

Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia

Islam and Nation is the twelfth book in the Studies in Asian Security series sponsored by the East-West Center and published by Stanford University Press. Rooted in the latest theoretical debates about nationalism and ethnicity, yet written in an accessible and engaging style, Islam and Nation presents a fascinating study of the genesis, growth and decline of a nationalist movement. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with nationalist leaders, activists and guerillas, Aspinall reveals how...

The Global Economic Crisis and Its Implications for Asian Economic Cooperation

The economic crisis of 2008amp;#8211;09 has had a highly damaging effect on Asian economies. While it appears in the second half of 2009 that the worst of the crisis is over, expectations are that the region will revert to its pre-crisis growth trend only in 2011, and many uncertainties remain. This monograph considers the implications of the crisis for the regionalism movement in Asia, which essentially began in 2000 and was going strong when the crisis hit. Regionalism in Asia has grown...

A New Geography of Knowledge in the Electronics Industry? Asia's Role in Global Innovation Networks

Debates about globalization are focused on offshore outsourcing of manufacturing and services. This approach, however, neglects an important change in the geography of knowledge--the emergence of global innovation networks (GINs) that integrate dispersed engineering, product development, and research activities across geographic borders. This new form of globalization poses new challenges and opportunities for research on international economics, economic geography, and international...

Climate Commitments to 2050: A Roadmap for China

Special topic for the Copenhagen climate talksIn this issue: Lead Article Climate Commitments to 2050: A Roadmap for China ZhongXiang Zhang, Senior Fellow, East-West Center, provides an exposition of the likely Chinese negotiating position for international climate talks. Zhang discusses the significance of 2030 as a target date for an absolute emissions cap and advocates for three transitional periods of increasing climate obligations before China could meet an absolute emissions caps....

Sustainable Growth and Resource Productivity: Economic and Global Policy Issues

Written by international experts in their respective fields Sustainable Growth and Resource Productivity provides a comprehensive overview of global issues of raw materials supply and resource use. It also introduces new views and perspectives on the sustainable growth of emerging economies and develops a rationale for a new resource economics. This book emphasises why resources are back on the agenda: firstly, because of their fundamental economic role in technological progress and long-term...