Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The article examines the role of infrastructure, governance, and political stability in the development of export-oriented manufacturing (EOM) in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, comparing their experiences with Africa's slower industrial growth. These factors occupy a prominent place in transaction cost economics, and the World Bank's development programs strongly stressed infrastructure building and good governance. The article concludes that despite the assumptions expressed in the World Bank's recommendations, neither efficient infrastructure nor good governance nor political stability constituted a prerequisite of EOM in the Asian latecomers. In these spheres, the performance of EOM-reliant Bangladesh and Cambodia was hardly favourable if compared to Vietnam, Laos, and Africa. Still, the contrast between Vietnam's diversified industrial exports and the narrow export profile of Bangladesh and Cambodia implies that a country cannot evolve from factor-driven development to efficiency-driven and innovation-driven development without overcoming the problems of poor infrastructure, red tape, corruption, and political instability.

This article investigates the causes of North Korea's failure to pursue export-oriented industrialization, and examines whether Sino-North Korean economic cooperation might facilitate such a transformation or not. It concludes that Sino-North Korean economic interactions are more likely to reinforce North Korea's traditional resource dependency than to stimulate export-oriented industrialization.

Utilizing state–society relations as a theoretic framework, this study investigates whether the Internet is used to facilitate or impede democratization in authoritarian regimes. The present paper uses governance practice as the mediating mechanism, along with a regime's degree of authoritarianism as a moderator, to measure the direct and indirect effects of the Internet on democratization. This research found that the Internet can be mobilized to suppress political freedom in authoritarian regimes, while at the same time reinforcing the legitimacy of the regime's basis—both of these deter democratization. The Internet, as a tool, must be complemented by democratic deliberation to fully generate democratization