Asia-Pacific Development Journal - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2006

This study examines the state of corporate governance in some countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Since the early 1990s, corporate governance has been receiving increasing attention from regulatory bodies and practitioners worldwide. A key aspect of improving corporate governance in the region is that improved investor protection and more transparent information will enhance the development of local capital markets and promote foreign investment to provide funds for long-term economic development. The authors suggest that individual countries should first focus on improving national standards of regulation and corporate practice rather than attempt to reach a common set of matrices from the start. When appropriate governance standards are in place in individual countries, codes of best practice could then be integrated into a consistent framework for all countries to develop more regionally integrated capital markets.

India’s financial and capital market reforms since the early 1990s have had a positive impact on both the banking sector and capital markets. Nevertheless, the capital markets remain shallow, particularly when it comes to differentiating high-quality firms from low-quality ones (and thus lowering capital costs for the former compared with the latter). While some high-quality firms (e.g., large firms) have substituted bond finance for bank loans, this has not occurred to any significant degree for many other types of firms (e.g., old, export-oriented and commercial paper-issuing ones). This reflects the fact that most bonds are privately placed, exempting issuers from the stringent accounting and disclosure requirements necessary for public issues. As a result, banks remain major financiers for both high- and low-quality firms. The paper argues that India should build an infrastructure that will foster sound capital markets and strengthen banks’ incentives for better risk management.

Taking the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan Province of China as the reference economies for comparison, the study focuses on the policy lessons for Malaysia in pursuing technology-based economic growth. The key elements examined are human capital, research and development (R&D), science and technology (S&T) parks, foreign technology transfer and government research institutes (GRIs). The analysis shows that the availability of skilled human capital in Malaysia is not sufficient for technological development to progress. The paper makes a number of recommendations to promote technological development in Malaysia.

This paper analyses the crisis and recovery in three East Asian countries, Malaysia, Thailand and the Republic of Korea. Using macroeconomic data for the three countries over a 13-year period, 1990-2002, the paper examines the factors leading to the crisis, the policy responses to the crisis, an evaluation of their recovery and the lessons that can be learned. While Thailand and the Republic of Korea had to turn to the IMF for assistance, Malaysia took the ‘unorthodox’ route of capital controls and a fixed currency peg to deal with the crisis. The paper argues that despite different policy stances all three countries experienced a largely similar V-shaped recovery. The paper concludes with an outline of key lessons for policy makers from the experience of the three countries.

This paper examines whether an increase in government expenditure on health has been accompanied by greater equality between the poor and non-poor in Thailand. In the period 1992-2000, real government expenditure grew on average 10 per cent per annum, the number of health services personnel and facilities increased and the rise was far greater than the growth in population or incomes per capita. However, in the distribution of public resources on health the bottom quintile of the population received disproportionately less government spending. The widening inequality between the poor and non-poor could partly be explained by large differences in the mix of health resources used by each province in the country over time and the associated costs involved. These phenomena imply that improving equity in public health care provision needs to be given higher priority in Government spending.