Ragnar Nurkse (1907-1957) belongs to the handful of economic thinkers associated with early or high development theory, also referred to as classical development economics or pioneers of development. This group is typically seen to consist of the following key thinkers: Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Hans Singer, Arthur Lewis, Albert Hirschman, Gunnar Myrdal and Ragnar Nurkse. It can be argued that collectively, their thinking epitomized the best development practices of the past 500 years. It is not a coincidence that the post-World-War- II era, when Nurkse and others ruled the development mainstream, is one of exceptionally good performance for many poor countries. During the 1980s, development economics was replaced by the Washington Consensus thinking and policies that became for all intents and purposes Washington Follies. In recent decades, most developing regions – with the well-known exception of East Asia – experienced growth rates that go clearly against the more or less positive trend of the last 200 years from a long-term historical perspective. In other words, the world after the industrial revolution has not seen such a dismal development performance.

Introduction

Carlota Perez' intellectual development and research interests have been well covered in other papers in this volume. This paper focuses on one lesser-known dimension of Perez' life long work, namely, her leading role in translating academic research into practical strategies and ways forward (called visions) for Latin America. Carlota's recent work in this area builds on substantial early working experience in carrying out import-substitution policies in Venezuela and her subsequent observations of (largely unsuccessful) attempts to move to export-led growth paths on the part of Latin American countries under ‘neoliberal’ or Washington Consensus policies.

Carlota Perez' working experience is very impressive. From 1975 to 1977, Carlota worked for the Institute of Foreign Trade (in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Venezuela) in charge of technology issues, then from 1980 to 1983 as director of technological development in the Ministry of Industry. From 1985 to 1987 she worked with members of CENTRIM, training innovation consultants in Venezuela. After this (until 1999) her work included various projects for both the Industry and S&T Ministries (including one for the Institute of Engineering that involved benchmarking S&T institutes around the world). Then from 1999 to 2002, Carlota worked as consultant to the Venezuelan oil holding company PDVSA, focusing on the R&D company INTEVEP. In addition, Carlota has advised the top management of major corporations, including IBM, on future techno-economic paradigms. This rich practical experience has fed back in to Carlota's research, giving it enormous practical resonance and relevance.

The above illustrates what for many was, in effect, the end result of repatriation, namely, total and utter disillusionment.

Introduction

This chapter deals with the period 1970–77, which was when the United Front (UF) government was in power. The UF was essentially a coalition made up of the SLFP and the traditional left-wing parties. It is thus a reflection upon a significant period in the progress of repatriation, when under the UF government there was a definite impetus toward accelerating the process of implementation, unlike in the previous five years under the predominantly UNP government. The compulsions that hastened the process also created economic hardship as well as political pressures, which gave rise to this period being popularly described as being the “Sirima Times,” which explains part of the title above.

Introduction

While economic growth in most East and Southeast Asian countries has been remarkably rapid during the past 25 years, the same cannot be said for the Philippines. The country's economic growth has barely exceeded the population growth rate, which has continued to expand relatively rapidly at 2.04% a year so far in the current decade (2000–2009). Economic growth quickened in the first half of the decade, but questions linger about its sustainability. Even at the 2004–2006 pace (5–6% per year), the Philippines has not come close to the growth trajectories of its neighbors. Thus, serious students of Philippine development contend that shifting the economy to a higher growth path—and keeping it there for the long term—should be first and foremost on the development agenda.

The country's disappointing performance in poverty reduction mirrors its growth performance. This is not unexpected. Every country that has chalked up significant achievements in poverty reduction and human development has also done quite well in securing long-term economic growth. Such a correlation is expected: economic growth is an essential condition for generating the resources needed to sustain investments in health, education, infrastructure, and good governance (law enforcement, regulation, etc.).

That achieving economic growth should be in the forefront of the policy agenda does not imply that nothing else can be done to lick the poverty problem. On the contrary, cursory evidence indicates that much can be done to enhance the poverty-reducing effects of growth.

Introduction

The importance of infrastructure for developing countries cannot be overstated—it is a major driver for growth and poverty reduction. For example, the lack of adequate transport, water, and energy facilities can adversely affect the development of existing industries and may preclude new entrants. An efficient transport and communication infrastructure provides overall mobility for goods and people alike, contributes to reducing input and transaction costs, and enhances the efficiency of markets. Local infrastructure, which may have significant spillover effects, spurs local economic activities while the network characteristics of infrastructure enhance the connectivity of regions and promote domestic integration. The key role of infrastructure in economic growth cannot be overstated. A recent joint study substantiates the decisive role that infrastructure has played in growth and poverty reduction in East Asia and the Pacific (ADB, JBIC, and World Bank 2005).

This chapter takes off from sources-of-growth studies in which application of the growth diagnostic framework points to the possibility that inadequate infrastructure is constraining economic growth. This chapter analyzes specific factors responsible for the lack of infrastructure and then provides policy recommendations to help overcome those constraints. It attempts to provide an empirical basis for the often-claimed key role of infrastructure in fostering economic growth. Thus, the chapter investigates whether poor infrastructure acts as a binding constraint to economic growth. The basis for the popular claim that infrastructure matters to economic growth seems to be anecdotal and founded more on conviction than on empirical analysis.

The theory of capital movements has not been treated systematically, so far, in the literature of economics. The reason for this neglect may well be found largely in the fact that the classical doctrine of international trade, the theory of comparative costs, rests on the fundamental assumption that while the factors of production, labor and capital, are freely mobile inside a given country, they are lacking external freedom of mobility. This basic premise of the international immobility of capital seems to have prevented the possibility of a theoretical approach to capital movements, at least from the standpoint of international trade theory. It is significant that whenever the so-called problem of transfers comes up in the orthodox theory of international trade, the discussion is always concerned with indemnity payments between governments and matters of this kind, never with spontaneous, economic money transfers, i.e., with capital movements in the strict sense.

Secondly, the theory of capital movements undoubtedly suffers from the fact that the transfer problem, which arises in capital movements as well as in indemnity payments, has taken up far too much room at the center of the stage. No attempt has been made to look beyond it, either at the causes of capital movements or at their effects. The discussion has been limited to the immediate process of international transfers, in the belief that practical and theoretical problems could be seen here which actually have turned out to be largely spurious.

Born in a small town in Austro–Hungary into a poor Jewish family, Vambery distanced himself from his Jewish origins but not before acquiring a command of the Hebrew bible and the Talmud (Kramer 1999: 9). Excelling at languages, he left for Istanbul in 1857 where he earned his livelihood as a language teacher. After ‘several years’ residence in Turkish houses, and frequent visits to Islamic schools and libraries', he was ‘transformed into a Turk – nay into an Efendi’, as he claimed later in his introduction to Travels in Central Asia (1864). His journey to the East was stimulated, so he tells us, from a desire to prove his hunch that Hungarian was connected to the Turko–Tartaric language branch. In the guise of a Turkish gentleman he arrived in Tehran in July 1862 where he presented himself at the Turkish, French and British consulates. Finding his onward journey forestalled owing to the situation in Afghanistan, he spent the next six months in Persia. Eventually meeting a party of simple Tartar–Chinese pilgrims returning to their homeland, he decided to accompany them in the guise of a dervish. Sometimes placed in great peril, throughout his travels – which took him to Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand – he was stalked by fear of his disguise being penetrated. At the court of Herat the young ruler took him for an Englishman and the rumour rapidly spread to the bazaar.

Apart from the desultory action in German East Africa, Britain was involved in three subsidiary campaigns in the east when Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916: Mesopotamia, the Balkans and Egypt. Of the three eastern theaters, Mesopotamia was the most badly managed and the most inhospitable. After the surrender of a British-led army (made up largely of Indian troops) at Kut in April 1916, direction of the front passed from the military authorities in Delhi to the War Office. Robertson, despite his hatred of sideshows, understood that for the sake of Britain's prestige and the security of India, a withdrawal was out of the question. But he wanted operations conducted at minimal costs so that troops would not be diverted from Haig's army in large numbers. Under his stewardship there was a dramatic improvement in communications, supplies and administration as well as an increase in forces. In the second week in December 1916 Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, the British commander, was authorized to organize an advance, though no grand objectives were set. By then Maude had received reinforcements to the point where he held an advantage of roughly three to one in manpower (150,000 as against 48,000) over the Turks and possessed far more artillery. He began a slow, methodical advance and over the course of the next three months, ejected the Turks from their positions along the Tigris, culminating in the recovery of Kut on February 24, 1917. The remnant of the defeated army fled in disorder toward Baghdad.

Historical Background

The interventions of Christian powers in Islamic lands, starting with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British counter-attack of 1799–1802, had a profound psychological effect on Muslim states as far a field as Persia. Ottoman decline had been in evidence since the eighteenth century: military reverses and economic stagnation had reduced her territory and made her vulnerable to the expansive European powers, most importantly Russia. Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of this period had become for Europeans the problematic core of the ‘Eastern Question’ and would remain so for the rest of the nineteenth century. Attempts at reform by successive Ottoman Sultans seemed to most European outsiders only a staving of inevitable collapse. In 1807 Selim III was deposed and later murdered after the Janissaries – who with the ulama formed a bastion of reaction – rose to resist his military reorganization. Mahmud II eventually managed to destroy the Janissaries in 1826 and to institute wholesale reform of the army, but not before Serbia had won autonomy (1813) and Greece her independence (1830). Another potentially critical secession was forestalled in Albania by a massacre of dissident pashas and their supporters in 1830. Ottoman weaknesses had contributed to the rise of a rival power in Egypt, which the Albanian Muhammad Ali took over in 1805. Though nominally under Turkish suzerainty, the armies of the Egyptian pasha expanded into the Hijaz and Central Arabia, and under the command of Muhammad Ali's son Ibrahim completed the occupation of Syria in 1833.

Journalist and feminist, Grace Ellison was a strong Turkophile who publicized the cause of Turkish women in newspaper articles written from within ‘a Turkish harem’. She met Zeyneb Hanim, daughter of a government minister, in Istanbul in 1905. Zeyneb and her sister Melek had organised dinners in their home to discuss women's rights until forbidden by the government. The restless sisters then wrote to the French author Pierre Loti, who met them clandestinely and incorporated their stories into his sentimental novel, Les Désenchantées. Subsequently, Ellison visited the sisters in Paris where they had fled in fear of their lives. Together with Zeyneb she co-authored A Turkish Woman's European Impressions (1913). In the introduction Ellison wrote: ‘I, who through the veil have studied the aimless, unhealthy existences of these pampered women, am nevertheless convinced that the civilization of Western Europe for Turkish women is a case of exchanging the frying-pan for the fire.’ In An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915), published in The Daily Telegraph in the form of ‘letters home’, she described the sequestered day-to-day existence she led in the house of another Turkish friend, Makboulé Hanim, who she called Fatima. Ellison took pains to deconstruct the misconceptions of her fellow countrymen about the lives of Eastern women – she wrote she had been told not to use the word ‘harem’ in a public lecture because it might raise audience expectation of ‘improper revelations’. Nevertheless, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem retains the word in its title and includes a photograph of the author as a veiled Turkish woman.

Setting and Purpose of Study

East and South Asia include some of the world's most dynamic open economies as well as several least developed countries. This study examines the diverse experience of regional integration of a sample of South and East Asian economies. Using a set of country cases based on a similar framework, the study addresses an important policy question: how can each country's integration with its neighbors and more distant regional economies be improved? Of the eight country studies, five are from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and three are from East Asia (the People's Republic of China [PRC], Thailand, and Singapore). The country cases–which differ by per capita income, economic growth rate, country size, and location–provide fascinating insights into the relationship between regional economic performance and strategies for regional integration at country level. The study also offers lessons for other countries and subregions which are interested in developing national strategies to foster pan-Asian integration. As the next section shows, relations between South and East Asian economies have evolved considerably since pre-colonial times. The country cases focus on the period since 1990, as this period marks the beginning of strengthening integration between South and East Asian economies. The global economic crisis is expected to have a temporary, short-term negative impact on the process of South Asia-East Asia integration. Once global economic recovery commences, the pace of South Asia-East Asia integration is expected to pick up.

Daughter of radical parents who were close friends of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and the Carlyles, Lucie Austin was perhaps destined to follow the career path of her mother Sarah as a translator of German literature, having as a child travelled in Germany and lived for a period in France. Her marriage with minor aristocrat Alexander Duff Gordon in 1840 brought love and entry into fashionable social and literary circles if little money. However, nearly twenty years into her marriage and after having given birth to three children, Lucie discovered she had tuberculosis. In summer 1861 she set sail for South Africa, unaware that her exile ‘would be the bridge to a different kind of wholeness, the route to another identity’ (Frank 1994: 206). In the summer of 1862 she returned briefly to England but soon left for warmer climes, eventually arriving in Egypt in the autumn. She would live there until her death in 1869. There she acquired a new Egyptian household, led by her personal assistant, guide and translator Omar, which substituted her English one. Except for her married, eldest daughter Janet, who for a while came out to Alexandria, she thereafter rarely saw any of her own family. Published a year afterLetters from the Cape (1864), Letters from Egypt ‘ran through three imprints in the first year’ (Searight 1983: xii). They coincided with and helped feed a burgeoning British fascination with Egypt, and even led to their infirm author having to fend off trophy hunters from her home in Luxor in Upper Egypt (ibid, xvi).

Newspapers favorable to the army, such as the Globe and Morning Post, continued to be a thorn in the government's side, holding it, not the generals, responsible for the German breakthrough. The daily pummeling of Lloyd George by a section of the press had its echo in parliament. On April 9 Lloyd George addressed the House of Commons and in the course of rebutting charges that he had deliberately kept Haig short of reserves, made several incorrect statements. He declared that in spite of heavy casualties in 1917, the British army in France was “considerably stronger” on January 1, 1918 than it had been twelve months earlier. The allegation is misleading. It can be justified only if Lloyd George had included noncombatants such as labor battalions. The prime minister also denied that he had large British forces locked in secondary theaters, forces that would have been more useful fighting the Germans in France. He claimed that there was only one white division in Mesopotamia, and in Egypt and Palestine there were only three white divisions; the rest were either Indians or mixed, with a very small proportion of white troops. Here, what Lloyd George said was clearly untrue. In Palestine alone, Allenby had eleven divisions, consisting of about 100,000 white and only 6,000 Indian soldiers.

Daughter of Stephen Woulfe, chief baron of the Irish Exchequer, Mary became the second wife of Lieutenant–Colonel (later Sir) Justin Sheil in 1849. She went with him to Persia where he had been serving in the British legation since 1836 (he was minister from 1844 to 1853) and where she bore him three children. Lady Sheil published Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia in 1856, and it has been designated the first travel book on the country by a woman. Her narrative of the deposition and murder of Nasir al-Din's first Prime Minister, Amir Kabir Mirza Taqi Khan, is used as a primary source for this incident by Abbas Amanat in his biography of the Shah, Pivot of the Universe (Amanat 1997). An observant writer on her own account, she made full (sometimes verbatim) use of her husband's dispatches, especially with regard to the section in her book on the Babi movement which provides one of the earliest published accounts on the sect by a European.

From:

Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (1856)

Lady Sheil's account of Babism explains this manifestation of acute social and religious unrest in Qajar Persia as the work of socialists, communists and anarchists, ‘the opinion shared by almost all of the European colony in Tihran in 1850–52’ (Momen 1981: 5).