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* The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since A.D. 500By Bas Van BavelNew York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Pp. xi, 330. $60 cloth.Economic historian Bas Van Bavel [...]

This article examines the future of democracy in the East Asian regions. The author argues the social bargaining that reduced divisions between the people of East Asia and the government during the Cold War has lost its power, and if peace, liberty, and prosperity are to exist a new democratic bargaining must be constructed.

Nineteen ninety-eight may be the opportune time to evaluate India's position in the global economy as the nation is celebrating its 50th year of independence and is considered one of the world's most promising emerging markets. The Indian government instituted a series of economic reforms from 1991-1996 that have changed foreign investors' perspectives of the nation's economic prospects. India and its politics and economy are evaluated.

BY THE George W. Bush Administration's self-imposed standards, a successful conclusion to the Iraq War was well within reach. The president declared victory on May 1, 2003, a constitution was [...]

The EVENTS of September 111,2001 have led, among many other things, to the revival of an old debate about the relationship between poverty and political extremism. To get at the [...]

Local guilds in eighteenth-century France had difficulty getting started, but once begun they became indispensable to royal finance. Taxation of the guilds provided the government with revenues on luxury goods consumed by the nobility. Reliance on this income later prevented deregulation as the economy became locked into legal and illegal sectors. The guild structure became increasingly inefficient with guildmasters alternately exploiting and persecuting informal sources of production.

In 1996, the government of Sri Lanka enlisted the help of international consultants to address significant weaknesses in the country's public administration. Their study focused on reorganization of public administration structures, rationalization of public sector cadres and introduction of results-based management systems and procedures. The analysis focused on five main topics: consolidation of core strategic functions in the President's office; improvement of the policy coordination process at cabinet and ministerial levels; separation of policy-making, service delivery and regulatory functions of public administration; enhancing the effectiveness of line ministries through realigning tasks; and introduction of a results-based management system that links resource inputs with well-defined outputs of departments and offices. The urgency of public service reform has been an issue on the national agenda for some time. Until the institutional capacity and effectiveness of the public administration system is upgraded, the credibility of government efforts to bring about a more liberal and competitive market environment will be seriously in doubt. The recommendations in this article can be extended beyond Sri Lanka, serving as a general model of civil service reform for other South Asian nations.

Few terms are as ubiquitous as the strong state in the social sciences, yet there is no agreement on how to define it. The strong state crops up in the [...]

Amid the chaos, Indonesia is inching toward political and economic change. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 1997, reports of economic, political, ethno-religious, and military conflict occurring in [...]

Having rebounded more quickly than expected from the financial crises of 1997, East and Southeast Asian governments today appear to be models of fiscal responsibility. South Korea has won praise [...]

Editor's Note: This is a collection of papers and edited transcription from a general session of the January 1998 Pacific Rim Allied Economic Organizations 3rd Biennial Conference, held in Bangkok, [...]