China-India-Russia Moving Out of Backwardness, or, ‘Cunning Passages of History’

Abstract: This article reflects on the experience of India's engagement with China in two multilateral forums: the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Forum for Regional Economic Cooperation, formerly known as the ‘Kunming Initiative’, and the China-India-Russia Academic Trilateral Conference. Though both forums are so-called ‘Track Two’ ventures, the dynamics of the two exercises are rather different. As of now, the ‘Trilateral’ is rated relatively successful in so far as it has shown more substantial progress from ‘Track Two’ to ‘Track One’. Tracing these brief histories, this article argues that academic cooperation should be seen to have value in and of itself, and not merely as the mechanism that propels a speculative, academic exercise into state-to-state policy.In social science terms, the two exercises afford very different challenges, which are still to be realised in effective academic collaboration and a substantive agenda of research. In particular, the BCIM framework commends a perspective on transna...

Abstract: In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe'er contented, never know. Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking "What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like?" and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis, Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

Abstract: The promise of global institutions broken promises freedom to choose? the East Asia crisis - how IMF policies brought the world to the verge of a global meltdown who lost Russia? unfair trade laws and other mischief better roads to the market the IMF's other agenda the way ahead.

Abstract: From the Publisher: In recent years, debate on the state's economic role has too often devolved into diatribes against intervention. Peter Evans questions such simplistic views, offering a new vision of why state involvement works in some cases and produces disasters in others. To illustrate, he looks at how state agencies, local entrepreneurs, and transnational corporations shaped the emergence of computer industries in Brazil, India, and Korea during the seventies and eighties. Evans starts with the idea that states vary in the way they are organized and tied to society. In some nations, like Zaire, the state is predatory, ruthlessly extracting and providing nothing of value in return. In others, like Korea, it is developmental, promoting industrial transformation. In still others, like Brazil and India, it is in-between, sometimes helping, sometimes hindering. Evans's years of comparative research on the successes and failures of state involvement in the process of industrialization have here been crafted into a persuasive and entertaining work, which demonstrates that successful state action requires an understanding of its own limits, a realistic relationship to the global economy, and the combination of coherent internal organization and close links to society that Evans calls "embedded autonomy."