Search

Begin New Search Topic Government Political Geography Asia

81. How Will Bihar Shake Out?

Author:
Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi, and Ashish Ranjan
Publication Date:
11-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
The exit polls are out in Bihar, and we are none the wiser. It is seemingly a photo finish between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Janata Dal United [JD(U)]-Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-Congress Grand Alliance. The Bihar election is ending as it began, full of theatre and intrigue. We can only guess how it ends. We were making our way to East Champaran; we didn’t realise Narendra Modi’s rally would be in Gopalganj district that day. The rally was over, but traffic had stopped moving 2 km from the rally site; we would be stuck at the same spot for the next few hours. Nowhere else to go, we got out of the car and started chatting with rally-goers. An exuberant BJP supporter exclaimed, “We have 8-10 lakh people today!” This was clearly an overestimate, but the crowd was bigger than we had seen elsewhere. We stopped in at a roadside stand where 4-5 men were being served their thalis and asked from where they had come to attend the rally. “Dewaria,” responded one man (Dewaria is in Uttar Pradesh (UP), not Bihar). He went on, “None of us are from Bihar. People are coming from Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Allahabad. The Party gives us enough money to eat lunch as well.” The Muslim shopkeeper who was cooking for them, the only person there who would actually be voting in Bihar, was clearly supporting the Grand Alliance, but he was happy for the extra money generated from the rally. The real reason for the traffic bottleneck then became clear. The road had narrowed to a single lane. While we headed further into Bihar, bus after bus, each with a “UP” license plate, was headed the other way. We analysts often mistakenly use rallies to gauge the hawa for a party. But, ultimately, rallies are about theatre and spectacle, while elections are won on the strength of the ground-level campaign. Privately, a section of BJP workers have been telling us that they can now see the NDA losing in this election, not something we heard in the first couple of weeks of the campaign. In our previous piece, using available data, we argued that the NDA would have to do very well in the third and fourth phases of this five-phase election if it is to win, something that even BJP leaders have now said publicly. Given that the NDA was well ahead in 2014, the NDA might still pull off this victory. It is clear, however, that the Grand Alliance has run a stronger ground campaign than the NDA, and that the campaign has had a major impact on changing voters’ minds. The NDA now seems unlikely to get near the 172 assembly constituency (AC) segments it won in 2014. In the remainder of this piece, we assess the structure of the Grand Alliance, how it shaped the campaign, as well as how the campaigns, for both NDA and the Grand Alliance, conducted themselves during this election.
Topic:
Government, Politics, and Elections
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

82. The Institutionalisation of Climate Policy in India: Designing a Development-Focused, Co-Benefits Based Approach

Author:
Navroz K. Dubash and Neha B. Joseph
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
While there is growing attention to climate policy, effective coordination, design and implementation of policy require attention to institutional design for climate governance. This paper examines the case of India, organized around three periods: pre-2007; 2007–2009 and 2010-mid-2014, providing institutional charts for each. Several key themes emerge. First, the formation of climate institutions have frequently been driven by international negotiations, even while filtered through domestic context. Second, once established, institutions tend not to be stable or long-lasting. Third, while various efforts at knowledge generation have been attempted, they do not add up to a mechanism for sustained and consistent strategic thinking on climate change. Fourth, coordination across government has been uneven and episodic, reaching a high point with a specialised envoy in the Prime Minister’s Office. Fifth, the overall capacity within government, in terms of specialised skills and sheer numbers of personnel remains limited. Sixth, capacity shortfalls are exacerbated by closed structures of governance that only partially draw on external expertise. Seventh, institutional structures are not explicitly designed to enable India’s stated objective of climate policy in the context of development, which implies specific attention to co-benefits and mainstreaming.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, Government, Policy Implementation, and Institutions
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

83. Quality and Accountability in Healthcare Delivery: Audit Evidence from Primary Care Providers in India

Author:
Jishnu Das, Alaka Holla, Aakash Mohpal, and Karthik Muralidharan
Publication Date:
02-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
We present among the first direct evidence on the quality of healthcare in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly-representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We report three main findings. First, private providers are mostly unqualified but spent more time with patients, and completed more items on a checklist of essential history and examination items than public providers, while being no different in their diagnostic and treatment accuracy. Second, we identify the private practices of qualified public sector doctors, and show that the same doctors exert higher effort and are more likely to provide correct treatment in their private practices. Third, we find a strong positive correlation between provider effort and prices charged in the private sector, whereas we find no correlation between effort and wages in the public sector. Our results suggest that market-based accountability in the unregulated private sector may be providing better incentives for provider effort than administrative accountability in the public sector in this setting. While the overall quality of care is low in both the public and private sectors, these differences in provider effort may partly explain the dominant market share of fee-charging private providers even in the presence of a system of free public healthcare.
Topic:
Government, Health, Privatization, Health Care Policy, Social Policy, and Rural
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

84. Macroeconomic Update: Early Signs of Rise in Investment

Author:
Geetima Das Krishna and Rajiv Kumar
Publication Date:
07-2015
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
Economic recovery remains fragile on the back of a weak consumption demand. Sustained high growth will be achieved only with an upturn in the investment cycle. The government seems to have understood the importance of pump-priming the capex cycle directly through higher public capital expenditure and front loading the expenditure. While private investment remains muted due to stressed corporate balance sheets, weak external and domestic demand prospects and commercial banks’ cautious approach to expanding credit, there are some early signs that the private investment cycle is likely to turn around in the next six to nine months.
Topic:
Government, Economic Growth, Banks, Investment, and Macroeconomics
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

85. Report X Marks the Spot: The British Government's Deceptive Dossier on Iraq and WMD

Author:
Eric Herring and Piers Robinson
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT PUBLISHED A DOSSIER on 24 September 2002 setting out its claims regarding Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Parliament was recalled for an emergency session on the same day to hear Prime Minister Tony Blair's presentation of it. The dossier stated that Iraq had WMD and was producing more. After the invasion in March 2003, no WMD were found. Ever since, there has been controversy as to whether the dossier reported accurately intelligence which turned out to be wrong, as Blair has claimed consistently, or whether the dossier deliberately deceived by intentionally giving the impression of greater Iraqi WMD capability and threat than the intelligence suggested.
Topic:
Government and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
Pakistan, China, Iraq, Middle East, and Asia

86. China's Views of the TPP

Author:
Zhang Xiaotong
Publication Date:
04-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The International Spectator
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
The Chinese policy and academic communities have mixed views about the US-led TPP, either viewing it as a strategic attempt at encircling China, or as a positive spur for domestic reform and opening-up. Although the Chinese government adopted an open and flexible attitude towards the TPP, it has moved strategically by accelerating the negotiations of the RCEP and China-Korea FTA, as well as updating its FTA with ASEAN. A more interesting development is China's new initiatives for building two grand silk roads, one to Central Asia, leading on to Europe, and the other to Southeast Asia, leading on to the Indian Ocean. Both represent China's renewed confidence in finding its role in Asia.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
China, Europe, and Asia

87. How can developing cities provide better water to their residents?

Author:
Benjamin Edwards and Mohammad Hamze
Publication Date:
11-2015
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Urban Institute
Abstract:
The world’s urban population is projected to add 2.5 billion people by 2050, with nearly 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa. The provision of safe, clean drinking water in urban settings is a high priority for international development, and justifiably so. Drinking water that is protected from contamination improves health, education, and economic growth, yet roughly 150 million urban dwellers do not have access, with numbers on the rise. Fortunately, the problem has not gone unrecognized. An expansive body of work explores the causes of water market failures and the policy interventions national governments can use to mitigate them. This body of work, however, has paid less heed to local governments’ role in implementing those policies, a critical link in the chain of service provision.
Topic:
Development, Government, Water, and Cities
Political Geography:
Africa, Asia, and Global Focus

88. U.S. and Japan: New Policies toward the Korean Situations

Author:
Richard Weitz
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:
International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:
The new national security leaders in Japan, the United States, China and the two Koreas have assumed office at a precarious time. Despite the recent relaxation of tensions, conditions are ripe for further conflict in Northeast Asia. The new DPRK leadership is as determined as its predecessor to possess nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles while resisting unification or reconciliation with South Korea and its allies. The new government in Tokyo is also augmenting its military capabilities. Meanwhile, despite Chinese efforts to restart the Six-Party Talks, the Obama administration has refused to engage with the DPRK until it demonstrates a willingness to end its nuclear weapons program and improving intra-Korean ties. But this policy of patiently waiting for verifiable changes in DPRK policies may be too passive in the face of North Korea' s growing military capabilities, leading the new South Korean government, striving to maneuver between Beijing and Washington, to consider new initiatives to restart a dialogue with the North even while reinforcing its own military capabilities.
Topic:
Security, Government, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, Asia, South Korea, North Korea, and Korea

89. Japan's New Politics and the U.S.-Japan Alliance

Author:
Sheila A. Smith
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Electoral reform in the early 1990s ended single-party dominance in Japan and promised an era of new politics in which political parties would alternate control of the government. In the two decades that followed, Japan's foreign and domestic policy priorities were subjected to greater scrutiny and debate as Japan, like so many other nations around the globe, sought to reorient itself in a new post-Cold War world. The U.S.-Japan alliance that anchored Japan's postwar foreign policy was not immune to these domestic political reforms. For half a century, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) prided itself on managing the relationship with Washington. But its ouster in 2009 by the reformist Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) led many to expect that even Japan's alliance with the United States would be subject to serious review.
Topic:
Government and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Asia

90. Air pollution in urban Beijing: the role of government-controlled information

Author:
Chiara Ravetti, Yana Popp Jin, Mu Quan, Zhang Shiqiu, and Tim Swanson
Publication Date:
08-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
Abstract:
This paper looks at the problem of information control behind the unsustainable levels of air pollution in China. In particular, it focuses on a large urban area, Beijing, and it examines the role of the public, government-controlled information and the adaptation choices of households in response to signals about high pollution. Our analysis is based on a simple theoretical framework in which people migrate from rural areas to polluted cities, receiving a signal from the government about urban pollution; hence, they decide whether to adapt to pollution or not. We find that the government has no incentive to ensure sustainable air quality, as it can distort pollution information in order to attract cheap labour. We then analyse empirically two different air pollution indexes from different sources and agents’ behaviour in an original household survey collected in Beijing. We find that the official air pollution values are systematically distorted, creating perverse incentives for households to react to bad air quality, especially for people who rely on government-controlled sources of information.
Topic:
Government, Sustainability, Air Pollution, and Information
Political Geography:
China and Asia