Strategies to achieve the pro-poor growth in LDCs through industrial policy are explored. It is studied which industry played a major role to provide the poor employment opportunities in the process of economic development in Asia and Africa. It turns out that while the share of agriculture in employment of the poor was greater, manufacturing industry played a leading role to increase employment opportunities for the poor in Thailand and Taiwan, which are typical fast growing economies in East Asian for the 1970 s-90 s. The same tendency is found for Mauritius, which is another example of successful export-oriented countries in Africa, while other African and South Asian countries where the momentum of globalization had not fully incorporated, e.g. Malawi, South Africa and India, manufacturing industry did not absorb the poor for employment as much. It is concluded that manufacturing industry may increase employment of the poor more than agriculture if its comparative advantage is materialized through globalization, even though the share of agriculture in employment of the poor is greater than of manufacturing in typical LDCs. Even in the context of the pro-poor growth the role of manufacturing should not be overlooked.

Asian countries are contending with the reduction by half of the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015, set by MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) and WSSD. The poor financial capacity of governments and the decline of funding from international development organizations and ODA show their limitations for financing a rapid increase in urban environmental infrastructure. An effective solution is to diversify financing sources for investment in urban environmental improvement (UEI) through the development of Public-Private Partnership (PPP). The new role of international development organizations and ODA is to support institutional arrangements and policy making at the macro level with sector administrative and financial reform, and to enhance local government capacity at the implementation level by promoting local capital markets, providing information on international experiences, conducting seminars and training courses, and implementing pilot projects. UNDP, World Bank and ADB are the major multilateral institutions that support PPP activities in this field.

UEI is a central concern of Japan's ODA. It is important to change the aid policy from traditional “project base” to support self-development. Output-oriented aid requires donor agencies to aim at the final goals of targeted countries, draw the optimum steps to achieve that aim, and provide timely know-how and technology to improve the final outcome of ODA.

This paper examines how public education expenditure is equitably distributed across consumption groups in Yemen with the aim to consider the role for reducing poverty and income inequality. It employs a standard benefit-incidence analysis methodology, with attention to country-specific measurement issues and methodological limitations, using the micro-level data from nationally representative surveys and the government official data on schools and public expenditure. Gender and rural-urban disaggregated analyses are also undertaken.

It is found that Yemen spends the adequate level of public expenditure on education as a whole but the distribution pattern does not necessarily favor a poorer group in absolute terms. Women and rural population in any consumption groups gain far less benefits from public expenditure than males and urban population. The distribution pattern is different by the level of education and it tends to favor the poor at a lower level of education. However, public expenditure on primary or basic education does not appear to be distributed equitably to the poor in Yemen as compared with other countries while public expenditure on secondary and higher education is less inequitably distributed. A snapshot of demand for basic education implies that poorer households can be more responsive to expansion of educational supply and reduction in cost of schooling but that girl-specific factors need to be addressed for stimulating demand for rural girls' schooling in any consumption groups.

Policy implications to improve the distribution pattern of public education expenditure in favor of the poor, rural population, and women include: retaining a current high level of public financial commitment to education while ensuring the allocation prioritized to basic education; improving internal efficiency in basic education while expanding new programs for under-benefited children, especially rural girls; introducing programs to increase household spending among the better-off households at a higher level of education; and improving the information base on scholarships abroad programs on equity aspects.

An equilibrium by free trade policy does not satisfy Pareto optimality or Pareto efficiency when there is domestic distortions like non-spill-over externality in trading partner country who do not or could not deal with those externalities by any kind of measures or policy. Even if exporting countries with externality as trading parter could not adopt any response to those externality, Pareto optimality can be satisfied through tariff measures taken by the exporting country and importing country cooperatively. Under the condition above, export tax rate by exporting country plus import tariff rate by imporing country should be the rate of tariff rate of internalization of the externality.

Currency substitution, the holding by residents of foreign currency as a mean of payments, is a common feature of high inflation economies such as Latin American countries. In condition of high inflation, the public wants to protect from high costs of using and holding domestic currency, and looks for alternatives, for example, U.S. dollar.

While most Latin American countries have succeeded in stabilizing macroeconomies in recent years, the degree of currency substitution is still continue to be high. These phenomena are known as “ratchet effects” in currency substitution.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether in six Latin American countries; Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the degree of currency substitution has decreased in the second half of 1990's when macroeconomies are stabilized.

We derive estimated equation from currency substitution-type of money-in-the-utility-function model that has microeconomic-foundation to avoid ad hoc specification of money demand function. Moreover, we use ARDL (autoregressive distributed lag) approach for estimation to analyze not only short-term effects but also long-term effects.

Our estimation results show that the degree of currency substitution in all Latin American countries has not been affected by a reduction of interest rates differentials in our sample period. This finding seems to imply that in Latin American countries there exist “ratchet effects” in currency substitution. Therefore, we add a new variable that reflects ratchet effects to the estimated equation and confirm that there certainly exist ratchet effects in currency substitution in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Uruguay.

Kenya has been categorized as one of the more advanced African nations in terms of primary school enrollment ratios. But these ratios have been declining since 1980, when the gross enrollment ratio was as high as 115 percent. Kenya's net ratio at present is estimated to be as low as 60 percent. In a situation in which the educational budget is not sufficient to accommodate the total school-aged population, it is crucial to reduce the numbers of repeaters and dropouts in order to make the education system more efficient. Grade repeating and dropping out are critical issues for developing countries like Kenya, and much research has been done on these topics. Not enough is known, however, to predict which specific interventions would reduce repetition and dropout rates. Probably, this is because little on-site research has been done to establish the repetition and dropout rates at the school level, and the results might differ somewhat from those of analysis based on statistical surveys at the national level.

Based on our understanding that it is essential to shed light on the grade transition of pupils at the micro level, we attempted to trace individual pupils over three years, conducting interviews with their teachers, the pupils themselves, and the pupils' parents. In collaboration with two schools different in size and circumstance in the Narok District, where the majority of the population are Maasai, we principally tried to examine the process of grade transition. The Narok District has not been successful at schooling children relative to the national standard of Kenya, and the people there are predominantly the pastoral tribe.

The major findings in this research were as follows. First, over thirty percent of pupils regularly repeat grades, and repeating has therefore become somewhat normal. This condition is much worse than what was expected. Second, there were relatively few dropout pupils, though the expectation was of many, and the majority of dropouts were girls in the higher grades whose attrition was the result of pregnancy or marriage. Third, the high rate of grade repetition was not directly linked to a poor learning environment; rather, it tended to be connected to the head teacher's attitude towards examination results in the final grade, based on which all schools are ranked in a league table.

Exchange rate management has become a hot topic in academic circles examining the merits of fixed versus floating regimes. The 1997-98 Asian crises have refocused attention on the exchange rate management of East Asian countries. Most views expressed criticize the pre-crisis US dollar peg regime as one cause of the crisis. It is said that this regime caused the appreciation of real effective exchange rate and the subsequent loss of competitiveness. Most of the views also have favored greater exchange rate flexibility. In spite of the suggestion of greater flexibility, after the Asian crisis, not all East Asian countries seem to prefer the same exchange rate arrangement and assessment does not always seem to reach clear-cut consensus.

This article evaluates the pre-crisis and post-crisis exchange rate management in the selected East Asian countries by focusing on examining the trend of real effective exchange rate (REER), an indicator of a country's international price competitiveness. The main findings of the study are as follows: First, we found that the REER shows a clear trend of appreciation during the pre-crisis period while it reveals a rather stable movement during the post-crisis period. Second, we verified that the pre-crisis REER appreciation, which came from the pre-crisis dollar peg regime, gave the significantly negative impact on trade balance in some East Asian countries. Third, Our empirical evidence indicated that in the post-crisis exchange rate management, some East Asian countries have come to care more about the factor of the inflation adjustment in addition to the US dollar linkage. We speculate that they may have learned the lessons that the Asian crisis was partly caused by the simple US dollar peg regime accompanied by the REER appreciation and the worsened trade balance.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the framework of regional environmental treaty and policy in the Baltic Sea region in its entirety. The cooperation in the Baltic Sea is a pioneer case of a regional environmental political regime process and the Joint Comprehensive Environmental Action Program (JCP) for reduction of the pollution load and aims to cooperate on environmental conservation for the Baltic Sea. The regional scientific communities in the Baltic Sea region, who regional experts are allowed to participate and exchange views, have contributed to a new political regime and the structural form of environmental cooperation in the region. The political regime of environmental cooperation in the Baltic Sea is developing from after cold war 1990 s. This structure is different from that of North-East Asia (among Japan, Korea, and China). This is for the following reasons: 1. There is the tendency which frictions among North-East Asia countries discourages. 2. Cooperation among Baltic Sea states aims to increase the awareness of Polish and Baltic State municipalities and NGO on Baltic environmental political regime which is nothing in North-East Asia. In this paper I have tried to show that the current situation of the regional treaty in North-East Asia is significant of importance when maritime issues are discussed with the aim to build a framework for regional environmental preservation.

In what way do the people of the North and South share development problems, and how can we consider “development” through their perspectives or lenses in a deeper sense? For this inquiry, in this paper, I introduce a post-development thought that has been emerged and nourished through the struggles and experiences for decades or even centuries of the Mexican people. Extensive openended interviews with Gustavo Esteva, Mexico's well-known development critique, thinker, intellectual, grassroots activist, and one of the key persons of international NGOs networks, were conducted in January, August, and September 2002 in Oaxaca, Mexico. Utilizing interview material as the primary information source, with additional information from his writings, I describe the background and essence of the Mexican post-development thought that opposes the mainstream “development” ideology and globalization, and advocates the construction of an alternative society in which political and cultural autonomy of the communities and communal way of life are assured and a concept of “civil society” is defined differently from that of the Western civilizations. In the paper, I first present a biography on Esteva, as it would be important for us to know his background and how he developed or acquired the current concept of the post-development world. Second, I explain some key concepts in the thought and movement, such as autonomy, hospitality, decentalism, civil society, dialogue, etc. Finally, I make note of lessons learned from Esteva's work that are important to the people of the North. My intention in this paper is to provide a valuable “forum” and to facilitate awareness and debates of the “development” issue among Japanese professionals, scholars, students, and activists.

This paper focuses on “landlessness” to understand an important aspect of rural poverty. Landlessness has been regarded as a major cause of rural poverty in many developing countries, especially in rice-growing parts of Asia. However, few studies offer a theoretical framework for which to analyze rural landlessness.

The objective of this paper is to identify mechanisms through which many rural people become landless on the grounds of historical experiences and past empirical research outputs. The viewpoints cover population pressure, intra-family and intra-generational transfer of land, agricultural commercialization initiated by the Green Revolution, land reform, other governmental interventions, and vulnerability to natural disasters and environmental degradation. This paper also examines theoretical and policy backgrounds of such mechanisms.

As a result of literature review, this paper concludes that external interventions, such as colonization and development, combined with rapid population growth and physical land loss, have eventually transferred more marginal farmers from the category of farmers to that of the landless through various mechanisms. In theory, those mechanisms are more properly explained in the perspective of Marxian political economy. In conclusion, the causes of landlessness do not necessarily originate from social problems in rural societies. Rather, they have also been problematized and accelerated by such external interventions. Another important point drawn from the literature review is that the interventions were justified by neo-classical economics-led development policies made on the premise of access to land. Therefore, future development for a sustainable rural economy will need to incorporate all categories of the rural workforce, including the landless, on the premise that rural inhabitants do not necessarily have access to land.

Squatters are a major problem in Malaysia. Due to a shortage of affordable housing, squatters built their houses or shelters on government or private land in most cities. From the 1980's, more land was needed for economic development, therefore the government has committed to resettling the squatters who did not have any legal land titles. However, since there is no existing government law to protect the squatters' interest, most of the squatters are being resettled by force. This has had an adverse impact on the squatters especially in regards to their livelihood. In order to improve the current situation, the authorities, based on a humanitarian point of view, have implemented “Common Practices” to resettle the squatters nowadays.

This paper will evaluate the socio-economic impact on the squatters after being resettled by “Common Practices”, mainly considering the research findings in Pantai Dalam and analyzing the weaknesses of the resettlement practices with some recommendation for better resettlement policies in Malaysia.

Japan Green Resources Corporation (JGRC) conducted agricultural technologies verification surveys for eleven years from 1990 to 2000 in Magou terroir, Tillaberi Department, Niger. The author carried out a survey in 2002 on the sustainability of the agricultural technologies experimented in the technology verification surveys and diffusion of the technologies to the surrounding area.

In the wadji river basin, farmers still continue three technologies such as (1) paddy cultivation in the rainy season, (2) joint vegetables cultivation garden in the dry season, and (3) agro-forestry garden with combination of fruits and vegetables. Besides, the diffusion to the neighboring villages was recognized. In the glacis gentle slope land, that occupies about seventy percent of the Magou landmass, many farmers continue some intensification cultivation methods of mixed cropping of millet and niebe bean, such as early varieties, the combination of composite and manure fertilizer and chemical fertilizer, etc. These technologies were diffused to the neighboring villages by agricultural field officer who was involved deeply into the technology verification surveys.

On the other hand, the technology verification surveys left some problems that should be examined from now on. First, in the mesa plateau area where is generally considered as local inhabitants' common land, most components of the technology verification surveys involving reforestation and fodder cultivation have not gone well. Trial to reexamine the success case in these fields like PASP's trial on the restore of vegetation on the mesa plateau area and PED's fuel wood market program will get necessary. Second, large amount, about100million yen, will be needed to implement the original land use plan and production plan in Magou terroir.

Referring to the examples that the verified technologies have transferred to cheaper technologies in the process of diffusion to other villages, attempt should be made to make land use plan and production plan of Magou terroir again.