Many countries in Asia resist adopting better governance measures because it is the inefficiency and lack of transparency when issuing government licenses and permits that enable them to reap personal gains, a top Singaporean Minister has declared…

'Neither the state-driven development strategy of import-substitution industrialisation from the late 1940s to the 1970s nor the neoliberal market-driven strategy since the 1980s has been able to resolve endemic problems of rural poverty in Latin America. This Development Viewpoint argues that the major reason is that the main causes of rural poverty are structural - related to an unequal distribution of land and political power. Hence, effectively tackling such causes will require a new develop more...

Management consultancy for e-government is a new and emerging field. It has certain unique features that distinguish it from other types of management consultancies, most notably that in management consultancy
for e-government, the management consultant is also a hidden stakeholder as a citizen and thus can, and should, very successfully look after the interests of both the state as well as the citizens. This paper attempts to define consultancy, draws distinction between management consulting more...

A senior Google executive has said that public sector information technology (IT) budget cuts are provoking interest in cloud computing, but adoption of the media giant’s services in Asia has so far been limited to the education sector…

The economic gloom in the Philippines is doing little to dampen the uptake of IT services thanks to a number of public sector initiatives, according to a report from research firm Ovum...

Every day, governments around the world give authorisation for the export and transfer of weapons. These decisions affect the lives of millions of people. In some cases, these arms transfers undermine development, by fuelling conflict and armed violence, threatening peace-building efforts, or when they involve excessive unaccountable spending. Such spending can divert vital funds from public services such as education and health care, and when such spending takes place without accountability and more...

'Agricultural reforms were among the first elements of systemic transformation introduced in Romania in the early 1990s. By 2005 almost 95 percent of land was in private ownership, up from 9 percent in 1990. Collective farms were dismantled, land was restituted to owners based on records from the 1940s, and state farms were transformed into large corporate farms. However, these reforms resulted in land fragmentation. Many small and medium-sized farms were unable to benefit from economies of scal more...

'The rural sector in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has undergone a shift from predominantly collective to more individualized agriculture. During the 1990-2000 period considerably more land transferred ownership in these countries than in other successful land reforms, including those in Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
The basis of this shift from collective to individual agriculture lay in two interrelated aspects more...

'Recognizing that traditional forms of development finance would be insufficient to address the challenges of climate change, the Kyoto Protocol introduced the Joint Implementation (JI) and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to leverage private financing for climate-change mitigation. The CDM is intended to help developed countries to reach their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol as cost effectively as possible, and to contribute to sustainable development more...

'Kazakhstan has one of the highest ratios of GHG emitted to GDP produced in the world. Coal–which dominates Kazakhstan’s energy balance–is at the heart of the problem: coal-fired plants generate some 45 percent of Kazakhstan’s total GHG emissions. By 2012 Kazakhstan’s GHG emissions from the energy sector are projected to reach their 1990 level (100 million tons of CO2 equivalent).
Although Kazakhstan possesses substantial renewable energy potential, it is almost completely untapped; more...