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AbstractArab regimes have struggled to reform effectively and, as a consequence, have continued to perform poorly in terms of output and employment growth. Some Arab autocracies have experimented with partial liberalization, yielding benefits mainly for connected parties or cronies. There has been a chronic inability to craft policies capable of commanding widespread support in the population. Instead, the main groups in the economy have coalesced around the preservation of rents at the cost of achieving wider benefits. The paper attributes this not only to a combination of lack of credibility as well as issues of time consistency, but also to the failure to develop and present a coherent case for reforms capable of conferring benefits on the wider population, rather than concentrated benefits for a few.

Energy subsidies are used widely. Although adverse from an efficiency perspective, subsidies confer private benefits on particular groups and, once introduced, tend to be persistent. This paper examines the reasons why and possible ways of overcoming the barriers to reform. The starting point is to look at the motives lying behind the adoption of energy subsidies. Distributional motives were found to figure prominently while the role of interested parties or lobbies is also common. The paper then looks at the characteristics of countries that use energy subsidies. Countries with weak institutions – often non-democracies – tend to be associated with higher subsidies. The paper then looks at how country level conditions and constraints can be identified. An analytical-cum-policy framework allowing identification of the key constraints is proposed before turning to the types of policies – contingent on institutional capacity – that can address those constraints, such as compensating transfers. The paper also indicates how a better understanding of citizens' policy preferences and the trade-offs that are likely to be accepted is essential for designing reform.

The spectre of a 'Malthusian' catastrophe engulfing the subcontinent commands less attention currently than in relatively recent times. This is largely attributable to the greater sense of confidence in the food-grain supply capacity of Indian agriculture in the wake of the Green Revolution. From the mid-1960s through to 1980, output has maintained a growth rate in excess of 2.5% p.a., with yield increments rather than area increments accounting for the major part. Since 1950, per capita net availability of foodgrains has increased by over 20%, while the real price of foodgrains has shown a steady downward trend since 1968. Current projections suggest that self-sufficiency in food production can be sustained through to the end of the century. Yet this remains partly contingent on climatic factors and a slackening trend of population growth. However, population growth rates currently exceed 2.2% p.a. and the relative stability of fertility rates means that a diminution is by no means assured. While supply shortfalls could be met through increased imports of food commodities, the possible emergence of India in the longer term as a food deficitary economy could have serious implications for the international grain market, given the current structure of supply for foodgrains and the growing dependence, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, on food imports.

As the universality of political economy has receded before the myriad instances of particular economic rationalities, it has become increasingly clear that most non-capitalist structures are organized around a multi-centric set of dynamics. In this regard one would expect to find that the economic as a category possesses less univocal clarity and its precise sense is only vouchsafed through a cognisance of the broader, integrating set of validating principles. This would be true as much in Mauss's analysis of the Gift as it would be in relation to the dynamics of a feudal economy. In the first instance the transactional medium and symbolic sense of the act contains within it the premises of an entire system, while in the second example the implied free-play of economic indices rests, in reality, on the intervention of extra-economic factors, in this case, the intervention of the seigneury. From the case of one transactional exchange to the dynamics of an entire system, common to both is the reallocation of the category 'economic' and its merger with criteria and principles of a wider and more diffuse nature.

This paper examines the impact of colonial rule on a region of India that was very partially integrated into external trade markets. In particular, it suggests that while, as in other parts of India, imports of manufactured goods from the metropolitan country undermined local, artisanal and proto-industrial production, in the agricultural sector considerable growth in output occurred. In addition, as a result of state land revenue policy and the structure of local product markets, the proportion of output marketed also rose. This process of commercialization was accelerated by investment in social overhead capital, particularly in railways. However, with a high degree of skewedness in land holding and asset endowments, in a context of substantial agricultural population growth, commercialization led to a very uneven distribution of rewards. The longer term consequence was that the North Indian regional economy achieved major growth in output but without establishing the preconditions for a more sustained process of development.

"Asia is vast and varied, its physical contours subject to many different demarcations. For many centuries, European chroniclers considered that Asia started at Constantinople although over time this boundary was displaced eastwards. In this book, the Asia that we are talking about starts thousands of miles east of the Bosphorus in the flat and densely populated Indus and Gangetic plains of Pakistan and India before traversing the massive and desolate highland spaces of the Himalayas and Tibet, passing into the very diverse topologies of the many Chinese provinces and at its eastern perimeter, the Koreas, before falling into the sea opposite Japan. Beneath China lie the states of South-East Asia, stretching from Myanmar and Thailand through to the Mekong basin with Vietnam curled around its outer edge, while further south stretch the elongated archipelagos of Malaysia and then Indonesia, the latter extending far in the direction of the Antipodes. Over this immense terrain, it is scarcely any wonder that disparities in climate, ecology, social and political organisation and culture are so large. Yet in recent decades, there has been a marked tendency to speak as much about regional attributes as those at a national or local level. Indeed, talk of an Asian miracle or the Asian 21st century has become a new staple"--