Asia Institute - Research Publications
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ItemUsing Courts to Realize Education Rights: Reflections from India and Indonesia(World Bank, 2018-05-22)This paper examines the role of courts in promoting fulfillment of the right to education in developing country democracies, focusing on India and Indonesia—two countries that have experienced increased education rights litigation in recent years. The paper argues that this litigation has been part of broader struggles over education policy, inequality, and the capture of educational institutions by political and bureaucratic forces; and that the extent to which litigation has been used and led to policy changes has depended significantly on the nature of, and access to, the court system; the presence of support structures for legal mobilization; the ideology of the courts and judges; and the roles and willingness of litigants to pursue redress. Broadly, litigation has served the interests of the poor and marginalized, although gains have largely come through better access to education, while issues of improving quality have been less prominent.
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ItemThe political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia(Elsevier, 2018-07-01)Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than promote improved learning outcomes. Efforts to reduce teacher numbers, enhance teacher quality, and improve teacher distribution have accordingly constituted an assault on the interests of these elites, provoking powerful, if often subterranean, resistance. Broadly, reform has only occurred where the central government has employed policy instruments that have disciplined local governments and maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of resistance. The paper concludes by assessing the implications for Indonesian education.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRumbling of reform in China’s fiscal foundations( 2017-04-17)
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ItemPublic policy for a modernising China: The challenge of providing universal access to education under fiscal decentralisation(OECD, 2019)One of the key inequalities in China today is the divide between urban residents with local registration (hukou) and those without. This chapter examines the historical and systemic causes of this divide between the hukou and non-hukou populations, focusing on the provision of basic education. The limited access to urban schooling for the children of rural migrants is a divisive issue in the debate on citizenship and social rights of migrants, and one with adverse implications for labour markets and intergenerational mobility. This chapter uses the provision of basic education to illustrate how fiscal decentralisation in China – under particular historical circumstances, produced a divisive, rather than inclusive growth outcome. Moreover, even though education policies have shifted over the past two decades to calling for inclusiveness, their impact has to date remained limited, leaving the government with an inequality it does not want and finding very difficult to reverse.
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ItemUsing the Government Financial Reporting Framework to Redraw the State and Market Boundary in China: A Two-Step Approach(The World Bank, 2018)After four decades of remarkable economic achievement under market reforms, the leadership has called for a reset in the boundary between the State and the Market as an important corrective to help China sustain rapid economic growth, by imposing hard budget constraints on government and insulating SOEs from local government predation. This could start with revealing and reviewing the current operation and finance of the government through the new Government financial reporting framework (GFRS). The sheer size of SOEs and their engagement in provision and finance of public goods and services poses great challenge for China to immediately adopt international standard for GFRS. Given their huge size and diverse characteristics, it is neither correct nor practical to include all SOEs in the public sector. We therefore proposed a two-step approach for using the GFRS to redraw the boundary of the state and market. The first step is to adopt an accounting framework that aims to provide a comprehensive count of government operation and finance, focuses on the fiscal impact of entities, and simplifies the reporting requirements for the vast majority of SOEs. The second step is to review the government operation and finance with an economic framework. It is also hoped that the exercise itself will stimulate further reform of SOEs and a rethinking of the division of responsibilities between government and market. While one should not expect to reach a clear and ideal division between the state and market overnight, with successive iterations, the exercise will lead incrementally to greater clarity and improvements, as the process of implementing the GFRS sets off a beneficent cycle for China’s economic transformation to a higher quality and sustainable growth.
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ItemBudget reform in China: Progress and prospects in the Xi Jinping era(ANU Press, 2018)
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ItemFiscal Futures: Will China Offer an Alternative Development Model?(International Budget Partnership, 2019-03-13)Forty years since launching its program of “reform and opening,” China is still going strong as a one-party state. Under the Communist Party’s tutelage, China’s development has diverged from historical patterns whereby growing economic prosperity has led invariably to the rise of democratic institutions, as richer and better educated citizens demand more say in society and government. Rather than becoming more democratic, China has instead become more authoritarian and intolerant. The question we address in this post is whether China’s current path is a temporary detour, or if it represents the emergence of a new development “model” that the Chinese government is touting. We argue that the results-based, pragmatic approach to politics associated with “Chinese-style democracy” may look attractive to countries seeking to kickstart development, but the authoritarian aspect of the model, along with its economic foundations, may be unsustainable even in China where hard tax and spending choices will soon have to be made.
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ItemRegular sound change: the evidence of a single example(Faculty of Humanities. University of Indonesi, 2018-01-01)The Neogrammarians of the Leipzig School introduced the principle that sound changes are regular and that this regularity is without exceptions. At least as a working hypothesis, this principle has remained the basis of the comparative method up to this day. In the first part of this paper, I give a short account of how historical linguists have defended this principle and have dealt with apparent counter evidence. In the second part, I explore if a sound change can be regular if it is attested in one instance only. I conclude that it is, provided that the concomitant phonetic (and phonotactic) evidence supporting it is also based on regularity. If the single instance of a sound change is the result of developments which are all regular in themselves, it is still in line with the regularity principle.
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ItemThe Lisbon book of pantuns(Imprensa Nacional, 2019)
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ItemAustronesian Linguistics(Oxford University Press, 2017)