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The study investigates the role of digital-government (DG), government utilization, and regional integration on public health services (PHS) by considering E-government and globalization. This study takes public services fragility as a proxy for public health services. In contrast, E-government development as a DG globalization index (GI) has been taken as a proxy of regional integration, and government expenditures (GE) as a fiscal state capacity. The study employed a two-step system generalized method of moments estimation for the sample of 45-panel Asian economies from 2006-to-2022. The results reveal that DG substantially impacted and improved the PHS in Asian economies in the past decade. Moreover, regional integration added fuel to this progression and substantially influenced the PHS. However, GE adversely affects the PHS due to lousy governance and leakage of target spending. Furthermore, the novel DG integration with GE and GI promoted PHS and reduced health fragility through better resource utilization and technology deployment. It also reveals that DG helps in reducing the loopholes of GE and makes the resource implementation transparent and effective, which impacts the PHS. It concludes that these interactions with public policies play a prominent role in comprehensive coverage and healthcare accessibility in Asia through technology deployment with prudent administration strategies. It’s a novel study that integrates digitalization with regional integration and government expenditures from an Asian perspective by considering PHS, which made this study helpful for policy drafting during the COVID-19 pandemic and proposed a better framework to deal with future calamities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The USA and Asia have an enormous stake in each others' continuing prosperity. This outcome is linked to the preservation of the open international economic order, which in turn faces challenges at both the interstate diplomatic level and at the domestic political level. The global financial crisis is probably the worst since the Great Depression and the domestic politics makes it increasingly difficult to formulate a constructive trade policy. In the absence of adequate reform at the global level, the alternative could be further fragmentation into competing regional blocs. Asia holds the key, combining both dissatisfaction with existing global arrangements with the resources to reconstitute, at least at the regional level, an alternative set of institutions and practices. How Asia responds, acting to strengthen reformed global institutions or undermine them in favor of regional alternatives, will partly depend on the policies of the dominant global power, the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares US and Asian views of the international economic architecture including Asia's evolving regional institutions. Lessons from the global financial crisis are used to assess reforms of the financial institutions better to prevent and manage future crises. While G-20 leaders have increased the resources of the International Monetary Fund, much work remains to restore its legitimacy and independence and to define clearly the Financial Stability Board's mandate to strengthen financial oversight and regulation. The paper critiques proposals for a global super-regulator and concludes that while the global architecture is important, the tests of its success will be fewer government actions to self-insure and the willingness to heed warnings of future problems and take timely corrective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of evidence suggests that China's emergence is having differential effects on Asia's advanced and developing countries. The region's advanced countries are benefiting from the existence of a large and rapidly growing Chinese market for their capital goods, components and technology, whereas its developing countries compete head to head with China in third markets. These facts create additional challenges for late-industrializing Asian countries seeking to catch up with the region's industrial leaders. In turn, the emergence of an Asian core and periphery will not encourage the development of a cohesive Asian economic and political bloc. Asian regionalism will be open regionalism in order to prevent regional initiatives from giving rise to costly trade diversion. Efforts to promote Asian financial development and integration are unlikely to come at the expense of the region's financial links with the rest of the world. An early move toward a common exchange rate regime with the associated common monetary stance will be problematic. And, in the absence of these common policies, pressure for the development of powerful regional institutions to formulate the common monetary stance will be at best modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]