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Alongside the growing literature exploring Australia's political, strategic, and economic relationships with the nations of the Asia-Pacific, there is an emerging body of scholarship analysing the ...

Higher education in Australia is currently in a state of flux, with the Federal Government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency commencing operations in January 2012. The ‘After Standards Project’ has been working with Australian university history departments and the Australian Historical Association, educating and empowering the discipline to act as a united community and assert ownership of a standards process. This article provides a stocktake of the achievements and challenges the After Standards Project has faced in coming to terms with the new environment and resultant new demands around compliance and accountability. It discusses the After Standards Project’s work in terms of both quality assurance and quality improvement, with reference to the establishment of a set of discipline standards and the trial of an accreditation scheme.

The 1997-98 Pacific Asian crises have left most established interpretations of the region's long-term growth in serious disarray. This paper begins the task of reinterpreting Pacific Asian economic growth through, in particular, an examination of the Thai experience. It is argued that, while Thailand's growth from the early 1960s was associated with the least interventionist state in Pacific Asia, by international standards there were high levels of price distortion. From the late 1970s changed circumstances reduced both the level and, more significantly, the effectiveness of the Thai developmental state. These developments, while playing a role in the sustaining of the Kingdom's rapid growth and structural change during the period 1986-96 also made the Kingdom extremely vulnerable to financial disruption. It is suggested that the Thai situation has wider application in seeking to understand Pacific Asian growth in general and the 1997-98 crisis in particular. This leads to a questioning of the IMF neolib...

The rapid economic growth experienced by a number of East and South East Asian economies has attracted a great deal of attention. These economies are widely regarded as forming the dynamic core of a major new sub-division of the global economy. The basis for this view is reviewed and it is concluded that while there is evidence for a Pacific Asian core region, it is difficult to substantiate claims for broader trans-Pacific integration. The internal structure of the Pacific Asian region is examined in terms of the emergence of Regional and Sub-regional divisions of labour. It is argued that these are integral to regional integration and continued economic growth. However, the increasing integration of some of the region's economies is offset by an intensifying of competition amongst others. The prospects for the establishment of a formal regional structure rest on the reconciling of these opposing forces. The pressure for this is likely to come from changes in the global economy which promote the organisation of trade in a series of highly managed trading blocs. The much vaunted dynamism of some of the Pacific Asian economies has tended to obscure the uneven nature of growth and its environmental and human costs. Finally the sustainability and likely patterns of future regional development are assessed in terms of current regional and global economic and political trends.

A collection of essays examining the various ways in which 19th and 20th century European rule has affected the economic, social and political geography of post-colonial countries. A series of richly textured, local studies conveying the nature of colonial experience and examining in detail the key issues in the debate about the nature of imperialism. Although each chapter stands alone as an independent statement with its own focus and conclusions, they all address the central theme and provide a comparative analysis of similar processes.