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1381. Insecticide Resistance and Malaria A Threat Decades in the Making

Author:
William G. Brogdon, Anthony Fiore, S.P. Kachur, Laurence Slutsker, and Robert A. Wirtz
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
Insecticide (DDT) use to control malaria was first employed successfully in the antimalaria program in Greece in 1947. By 1951, DDT success in controlling malaria was reported in 22 countries. However, that year also saw the first report of DDT resistance, in Anopheles sacharovi in Greece. By 1954, resistance to DDT among mosquitos was known to be a global problem, documented in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The World Health Organization–led Global Malaria Eradication Program (GMEP) began in 1955, when resistance was already pronounced worldwide. Scientists did not identify the underlying biochemical mechanism contributing to insecticide resistance until 1958. By then, insecticide resistance was recognized by many to be a major contributor to the ultimate dismantling of GMEP, given the limited capabilities and knowledge of the time. Consequently, the global focus shifted from malaria “eradication” to malaria “control” in the late 1960s.
Topic:
Environment, Health, and Infectious Diseases
Political Geography:
Africa, Greece, and Asia

1382. Federated Defense in Asia

Author:
Michael J. Green, Kathleen H. Hicks, and Zack Cooper
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
The United States has long emphasized the desirability of working with allies and partners to meet pressing security challenges. Indeed, many of our most vexing security concerns—from terrorism to cyber attacks—are best met with concerted multilateral responses. At a time when the United States and many of its allies and partners are reluctant to increase defense and security spending, working together is paramount. This is perhaps most evident in Asia, where present and potential future threats to security and prosperity are high and shared interests are substantial.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Diplomacy, Disaster Relief, Humanitarian Aid, and Intelligence
Political Geography:
United States and Asia

1383. The Civil Transition in Afghanistan: The Metrics of Crisis?

Author:
Anthony H. Cordesman
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
Creating an effective transition for the ANSF is only one of the major challenges that Afghanistan, the US, and Afghanistan's other allies face during 2014-2015 and beyond. The five other key challenges include: Going from an uncertain election to effective leadership and political cohesion and unity. Creating an effective and popular structure governance, with suitable reforms, from the local to central government, reducing corruption to acceptable levels, and making suitable progress in planning, budgeting, and budget execution. Coping with the coming major cuts in outside aid and military spending in Afghanistan, adapting to a largely self-financed economy, developing renewal world economic development plans, carrying out the reforms pledged at the Tokyo Conference, and reducing the many barriers to doing business. Establishing relations with Pakistan and other neighbors that will limit outside pressures and threats, and insurgent sanctuaries on Afghanistan's border. Persuading the US, other donors, NGCO, and nations will to provide advisors to furnish the needed aid effort through at least 2018, and probably well beyond.
Topic:
Corruption, Economics, Governance, and Reform
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and Asia

1384. Afghan Forces on the Edge of Transition - Volume I Introduction, US Policy, and Cuts in US Forces and Spending

Author:
Anthony H. Cordesman
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
Creating an effective transition for the ANSF is only one of the major challenges that Afghanistan, the US, and Afghanistan's other allies face during 2014-2015 and beyond. The five other key challenges include: Going from an uncertain election to effective leadership and political cohesion and unity. Creating an effective and popular structure governance, with suitable reforms, from the local to central government, reducing corruption to acceptable levels, and making suitable progress in planning, budgeting, and budget execution. Coping with the coming major cuts in outside aid and military spending in Afghanistan, adapting to a largely self - financed economy, developing renewal world economic development plans, carrying out the reforms pledged at the Tokyo Conference, and reducing the many barriers to doing business. Establishing relations with Pakistan and other neighbors that will limit outside pressures and threats, and insurgent sanctuaries on Afghanistan's border. Persuading the US, other donors, NGCO, and nations will to provide advisors to furnish the needed aid effort through at least 2018, and probably well beyond.
Topic:
Military Strategy, Bilateral Relations, Foreign Aid, and Public Opinion
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, and Asia

1385. Is the European Model Relevant for ASEAN?

Author:
Eleonora Poli
Publication Date:
11-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
Before the 1997 economic crisis in Asia, the institutional evolution of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was very different from the European model. The economic downturn in the late 1990s and the global shift toward a neo-liberal economic era urged ASEAN countries to rethink their regional integration strategy and to mimic some of the institutional models in Europe. In light of this, this paper analyses the rationale behind the evolution of ASEAN since the late 1990, evaluating how and why the organization on a surface replicated aspects of the EU model without engaging in meaningful supranational institutionalization.
Topic:
Economics, Regional Cooperation, and Governance
Political Geography:
Europe and Asia

1386. Timeline: Politicization of Sexuality

Author:
Meehyun Nam- Thompson
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
While international organizations and governments move to expand equality for all—regardless of sexual orientation—recent global developments threaten this progress. The timeline begins at a pivotal moment, the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, widely regarded as a catalyst for the modern LGBT movement. Stonewall is considered the first instance of community solidarity against systematic, state-sponsored persecution of sexual minorities. While the struggle has been ongoing, the most significant developments have occurred in the last 25 years, including expansion of voting rights, social welfare benefits, and political power. We end our timeline, however, with a disturbing new trend—the passage of homophobic legislation in Africa, South Asia, and Russia.
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, New York, South Asia, and Asia

1387. Change Management

Publication Date:
06-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
Pocket change-mountains of it can shape or re-shape society, politics, and most certainly the economy. The rise and fall of governments, democracies, and tyrannies are all too often at the mercy of the ebb and flow of plain, hard cash. Currencies today are very much the defining feature of nations, individually and collectively. A flailing and fragmented Europe seeks to hang together-retain its global reach-on the strength of a single currency that has taken on a life or neardeath of its own, its very existence becoming an end in itself. Across Africa and Asia, the Americas north and south, continents and peoples are all too often held hostage by forces unleashed in the name of money. It is this kaleidoscope of silver, gold, and paper, often in the magnitude of tsunamis, that we set out to explore in the Summer issue of World Policy Journal.
Political Geography:
Africa, America, Europe, and Asia

1388. Value Subtraction in Public Sector Production: Accounting Versus Economic Cost of Primary Schooling in India

Author:
Lant Pritchett and Yamini Aiyar
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
We combine newly created data on per student government expenditure on children in government elementary schools across India, data on per student expenditure by households on students attending private elementary schools, and the ASER measure of learning achievement of students in rural areas. The combination of these three sources allows us to compare both the “accounting cost” difference of public and private schools and also the “economic cost”—what it would take public schools, at their existing efficacy in producing learning, to achieve the learning results of the private sector. We estimate that the “accounting cost” per student in a government school in the median state in 2011/12 was Rs. 14,615 while the median child in private school cost Rs. 5,961. Hence in the typical Indian state, educating a student in government school costs more than twice as much than in private school, a gap of Rs. 7,906. Just these accounting cost gaps aggregated state by state suggests an annual excess of public over private cost of children enrolled in government schools of Rs. 50,000 crores (one crore=10 million) or .6 percent of GDP. But even that staggering estimate does not account for the observed learning differentials between public and private. We produce a measure of inefficiency that combines both the excess accounting cost and a money metric estimate of the cost of the inefficacy of lower learning achievement. This measure is the cost at which government schools would be predicted to reach the learning levels of the private sector. Combining the calculations of accounting cost differentials plus the cost of reaching the higher levels of learning observed in the private sector state by state (as both accounting cost differences and learning differences vary widely across states) implies that the excess cost of achieving the existing private learning levels at public sector costs is Rs. 232,000 crores (2.78% of GDP, or nearly US$50 billion). It might seem counterintuitive that the total loss to inefficiency is larger than the actual budget, but that is because the actual budget produces such low levels of learning at such high cost that when the loss from both higher expenditures and lower outputs are measured it exceeds expenditures.
Topic:
Economics, Education, Privatization, and Reform
Political Geography:
India and Asia

1389. Can't Afford to Wait: Why Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation plans in Asia are still failing millions of people

Author:
Steph Cousins
Publication Date:
11-2014
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
Climate-related disasters and food crises are devastating thousands of lives and holding back development across Asia. A year on from the devastating super-typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Oxfam calls for governments across Asia, backed by regional and global institutions and fair contributions from wealthy countries, to ramp up efforts to address these challenges. Without greater investment in climate and disaster-resilient development and more effective assistance for those at risk, super-typhoon Haiyan-scale disasters could fast become the norm, not the exception.
Topic:
Climate Change, Disaster Relief, Environment, Humanitarian Aid, and Natural Disasters
Political Geography:
Asia and Philippines

1390. Understanding Mandis: Market Towns and the Dynamics of India's Rural and Urban Transformations

Author:
Devesh Kapur and Mekhala Krishnamurthy
Publication Date:
10-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Abstract:
Mandis or physical, primary agricultural markets are old and ubiquitous institutions of economic life in many parts of India. Wherever they form, they are usually dense sites of economic, social and political activity, connecting and shaping the relations between town and countryside, and between local markets for commodities and larger, national and global circuits of capital and commerce. According to available estimates, there are over 7500 regulated agricultural markets in India today, operating under different state level acts covering a huge variety of notified agricultural produce.
Topic:
Agriculture, Emerging Markets, and Food
Political Geography:
India and Asia