Asian Economic Policy Review最新文献

{"title":"Japan Center for Economic Research","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12415","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"148"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12415","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50128976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “What the Welfare State Left Behind—Securing the Capability to Move for the Vulnerable”","authors":"Keisuke Kawata","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12413","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Gotoh and Kambayashi (<span>2022</span>) tackle important topics, including proposing a new measurement of human welfare and capturing some of the problems under COVID-19. Their measurement is based on the capability approach, and it is their ultimate goal to reexamine the transformation of publicness in contemporary Japan.</p><p>I agree that Gotoh and Kambayashi's paper can significantly contribute to economic research, especially empirical welfare analysis (Fleurbaey, <span>2009</span>; Saez & Stantcheva, <span>2016</span>; Fleurbaey & Maniquet, <span>2018</span>). Moreover, their paper can provide an important perspective to discussing public policies.</p><p>In particular, it is a unique and good idea to apply the capability approach to the “the stay-home policy.” Gotoh and Kambayashi's data is for older respondents with COVID-19, who may be seriously affected by the pandemic, and their capability is mostly damaged. I think both the policy and data are relevant to the capability approach.</p><p>However, I strongly suggest that Gotoh and Kambayashi improve the transparency of their methods and findings because some parts of the current version are unclear and not self-contained. I believe research transparency is especially important in the general-interest and policy journals, including the <i>Asian Economic Policy Review</i>. Moreover, transparency can increase the social impact of this important paper.</p><p>I have five specific comments. First, their main contribution is to evaluate human welfare by unique measurement connecting publicness and the capability approach. I think this measurement is a reasonable alternative to traditional welfare measurement (for example, income and consumption). However, I cannot find a clear discussion about the relevance of publicness and the capability approach. Those concepts may not be familiar to potential readers, and Gotoh and Kambayashi should then explicitly discuss why the capability approach is relevant for discussing and measuring publicness.</p><p>Second, I guess Gotoh and Kambayashi's paper is not a purely theoretical paper proposing new welfare measurement; measuring contemporary Japan is also an important research goal. However, while the measurement concepts are explained in detail, I can only find a poor explanation of their data. They should provide more information about the data and then discuss the uncertainty of measurement results due to the incompleteness of the data. I guess another paper (Kambayashi <i>et al</i>., <span>2022</span>) provides a detailed explanation, but the present paper should include an explanation of important information, at least the sample size, the sampling method, and missing values. That information is especially important to evaluate the reliability of their empirical results. Additionally, I prefer researchers to report sampling uncertainly (for example, standard errors or confidence intervals).</p><p>Third, Gotoh and Kambayashi's introduction p","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"146-147"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12413","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50120314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “Social Justice and Affirmative Action in Malaysia: The New Economic Policy after 50 Years”","authors":"Kwame Sundaram Jomo","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12411","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Any meaningful assessment of Malaysia's New Economic Policy (NEP) (Lee, <span>2022</span>) should be historical. One question which arises here is how one does historical political economy. After all, there are many different schools of political economy, even if few have addressed “affirmative action.”</p><p>A key question is how one treats normative issues that inevitably come up. How one understands notions such as “social justice” has long been contested. These are often understood and invoked very differently. And how is a term such as “affirmative action”, which arose in response to US civil rights struggles in the middle of the 20th century, to be understood in other contexts?</p><p>When first announced to the Malaysian nation in mid-1971, the NEP was presented as being needed for building “national unity” following the divisive events of May 1969. The NEP has often been presented officially and by others as responding to “race riots” following the young nation's third general elections in which the incumbent multi-ethnic Alliance coalition lost its electoral majority. This perspective implies inter-ethnic economic disparities were responsible for “May 1969”.</p><p>Anand's (<span>1982</span>) Theil decomposition suggests that less than a tenth of overall income inequality in 1970 (before the NEP) could not be explained by various non-ethnic factors such as education. Anand concludes that, at most, only a corresponding share of income inequality can be attributed to ethnicity. His analysis implies there is limited scope for reducing overall income inequality by reducing inter-ethnic disparities. The NEP's primarily ethnic focus for over half a century is hence unlikely to significantly lower economic inequality in Malaysia. Unsurprisingly, despite over half a century of the NEP, total income inequality remains high, even if underestimated.</p><p>Equating “social justice” with efforts to reduce inter-ethnic disparities is problematic. Supported by and responsive to the newly emerging Malay “middle class”, the new Malaysian regime defined “restructuring society” as one of the two NEP targets. This has been mainly understood as “positive discrimination”, or affirmative action, along ethnic lines, to eliminate the identification of “race” with “economic function”.</p><p>Defining social justice in terms of achieving affirmative action policy is problematic. Such a definition also effectively rejects other possible interpretations of “social justice”, for example, in terms of “abolishing class exploitation”, or achieving low income or wealth inequality, or reducing disparities among different regions.</p><p>Sabah and Sarawak state rights within the Malaysian federation did not preoccupy Prime Minister Razak during 1969–1971. However, this omission in the NEP's ostensible social justice agenda is probably not acceptable to East Malaysians who believe they have not gotten a fair deal from the demographic majority in Peninsular Malaysia. Others m","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"120-121"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12411","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50154742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “What the Welfare State Left behind: Securing the Capability to Move for the Vulnerable”","authors":"Cassey Lee","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12410","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Covid-19 pandemic has increased poverty and inequality within and across countries (Narayan <i>et al</i>., <span>2022</span>). The World Bank (<span>2020</span>) has estimated that between 88 million and 115 million more people moved into extreme poverty globally in 2020. Some countries fared worse situations than others because of the weak responses from governments in terms of the adequacy of the health system, the vaccination rollout, as well as the deployment of fiscal resources to support households and businesses. The need for urgent economic policy responses to the pandemic and its consequences has also resulted in the use of interventions that were primarily based on consumption and income metrics. Such policies are likely to be more effective had they incorporated the notion of human capabilities, a concept in the capability approach to inequality.</p><p>Gotoh and Kambayashi (<span>2022</span>) apply the capability approach to help us understand why and how physical mobility should matter in formulating policies that are aimed to support persons that are vulnerable in terms of being disabled, requiring nursing care and the elderly. Several analytical and empirical innovations are required to do this.</p><p>A theoretical framework is first constructed to analyze differences in the level of capability across groups (in terms of vulnerability—disabled, in nursing care and the elderly) which are then further divided into sub-groups in terms of different (discrete) degrees of physical mobility (going-out/staying-home). Associated with these sub-groups is a vector of individual functioning (with each element indexed by vulnerability and mobility). To provide a quantitative measure of how mobility affects functioning, a vector of maximum attainable level of functioning based on different mobility levels is constructed. The “damage” associated with different combinations of vulnerability and mobility can be derived by computing the difference between the maximal functioning vector and each sub-group's functioning vector (via a Euclidean distance function).</p><p>The empirical innovations in Gotoh and Kambayashi (<span>2022</span>) entail the implementation of surveys to collect information on the sets of utilization ability and functioning. This leads to an assessment of how human capabilities are relatively affected across the different types of vulnerability and levels of physical mobility. Although not emphasized by Gotoh and Kambayashi but much emphasized in the capability approach literature, the freedom interpretation of capabilities is very important.</p><p>A significant contribution of Gotoh and Kambayashi (<span>2022</span>) is providing an example of how an empirically grounded approach based on the capability approach can be used in formulating policies that are aimed at improving the lives of the vulnerable during the Covid pandemic. One can further argue that the scope of the application of the capability approach to inequali","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"144-145"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12410","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50154740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “Social Justice and Affirmative Action in Malaysia: The New Economic Policy after 50 Years”","authors":"Muhammed Abdul Khalid","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12412","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The debate on affirmative action and the New Economic Policy (NEP) in Malaysia is controversial, and often attracts mixed and emotional responses to its relevance and achievements. Lee (<span>2022</span>) is an attempt to reset the affirmative action agenda in Malaysia by anchoring it on the principles of equality and fairness, and deserves serious consideration by policy makers.</p><p>Some of the key points of Lee (<span>2022</span>) are worth highlighting. First, the NEP policy design has unintended deficiencies. While the first prong of the policy (the reduction of poverty) has a specific target of reducing the poverty rate from 49% in 1970 to 16% in 1990, the targets for the second prong, the “restructuring of society,” are omitted, apart from increasing Bumiputera equity ownership to 30% by 1990. Other indicators, such as participation in higher education and professional occupations, were overlooked. The 20-year timeframe set for the policy is also impractical.</p><p>Second, public discourse often misguidedly portrays the NEP as a zero-sum game. The “terminate or continue” debate ignores the fact that the policy enjoys support from the Bumiputera community, and it is politically impractical to terminate it without political negotiations, at the same time disruptive to the recipients. While the argument that given the majority of the poor are Bumiputera and thus focusing on need-based would still help predominately Bumiputera, it “errs in viewing the NEP's two prongs as substitutes rather than complements.” Race-based and need-based policies are complements, not replacements.</p><p>Third, the focus of the NEP during the past decade has been mostly on the bottom 40% of households (irrespective of race) via mostly a cash transfer program and on micro and small enterprises, which are targeted mostly for the Bumiputera. The group-targeted policies have expanded beyond Bumiputera to include Indians, Orang Asli, women, and marginalized groups.</p><p>Fourth. Lee (<span>2022</span>) proposes that the policy be anchored on the principle of equality, and fairness to targeted groups. Lee also correctly argues that any policy changes to the NEP must go beyond household income.</p><p>However, there are some issues that warrant explanation or elaboration in Lee (<span>2022</span>). First, while it is generally assumed that the Bumiputera agenda started with the NEP, actually the pro-Malay economic agenda began during the latter part of the colonial period. The first official attempt by the British colonial government to address the Malay economic backwardness was institutionalized in the Draft Development Plan (1950–1955) It continued in the First Five-Year Malaya Plan (1956–1960), which included setting up the Federal Land Development Authority in 1956 to address poverty, especially among the landless Malays. The Malay-focus of the economic agenda by the British was a deliberate strategy to ensure that Malay nationalism post-independence would not nat","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"122-123"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12412","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50154741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “Income and Wealth Inequality in Asia and the Pacific: Trends, Causes, and Policy Remedies”","authors":"Li Gan","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12409","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I agree with Zhuang (<span>2022</span>) in his summary assessments of the negative effects of income inequality. Zhuang (<span>2022</span>) includes a section on the inequality in China, so I would like to focus my comments on this section, and particularly on the working-age households in China.</p><p>Most of the inequality measures cited in Zhang's paper and in other studies are from OECD or World Bank calculations. China's measures come from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Unfortunately, it is difficult to decompose NBS' measures since the micro-level data used by the NBS are not publicly available.</p><p>Fortunately, there are several large-scale academic household surveys that are available – one of them is the China Household Income Project, led by Zhuang's coauthor on other occasions, Shi Li from Zhejiang University. My analysis here is partially based on another survey, the China Household Finance Survey, that I am the lead investigator for.</p><p>Zhuang (<span>2022</span>) discusses income inequality decade-wise since the 1980s. I would like to list the biennial changes of income inequality since 2010. Table 1 lists the P90/P50 ratios between 2010–2018. According to Table 1, inequality decreased slightly, from 3.65 to 3.28, between 2010 and 2018. However, working-age households did not see much change in these ratios, while families with retired people (at least one person in the family is older than 60) see a significant drop in inequality, from 5.09 to 3.21.</p><p>To understand the reason for this, we compare government transfers to the elderly in the form of pension payments, and government transfers to working-age households. The former includes payments to retirees covered by both the Basic Employee Pension Insurance and the Resident Pension Insurance. The latter includes payments from all social assistance programs, such as unemployment benefits and <i>Dibao</i> payments.</p><p>According to the official statistics, the percentage of pension payments to gross domestic product (GDP) more than doubled from 2.1% in 2010 to 5.4%, in 2019. Meanwhile, the percentage of social assistance to GDP decreased from 0.97% to 0.80%. The increase of social pension payments to GDP is a combination of rising benefits and rising numbers of retirees. The per capita pension payment was RMB 8144 in 2012, and RMB 18,958 in 2020 with an annual growth rate of 11.1%. Meanwhile, nominal per capita GDP only grew 7.74% annually. This is because of the differences in social spending, and the reduction in income inequality among elderly in China while income inequality among working-age families is stagnant.</p><p>Figure 1 indicates China's social spending relative to other countries. The left panel plots total pension payments as a percentage of GDP, relative to its GDP per capita. This panel shows that China's pension payments are on par with the projected world average indicated by a regression line. However, the right panel of Figure 1 plots the s","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"42-44"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12409","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50149197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What the Welfare State Left Behind—Securing the Capability to Move for the Vulnerable","authors":"Reiko Gotoh,&nbsp;Ryo Kambayashi","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12408","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The purpose of the present paper is to measure the disadvantage of the <i>vulnerable</i> in contemporary Japan, focusing on their capabilities in moving both outside and inside the home. Our research interest is to find a new informational base other than consumption expenditure, which provides a strong clue about how to assess the eligibility for social support. We examine theoretical methods to apply the capability approach empirically, extending existing multidimensional poverty measurements. We find that people with disabilities and nursing care users are significantly restricted in their capabilities. The elderly in general, whom we have used as a reference group, are also in a precarious situation.</p>","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"124-143"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12408","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50137110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “How Inequality Affects Trust in Institutions: Evidence from Indonesia”","authors":"Takayuki Higashikata","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12407","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. (&lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;) address the challenging task of identifying how income inequality affects trust in others, organizations, and institutions through a cross-section analysis of Indonesia. As previous studies have suggested, the extent of trust is considered an important factor for economic development, for example, by reducing transaction costs. This has led many social scientists to analyze the determinants of trust, but few studies have shed light on the impact of inequality on trust (Gustavsson &amp; Jordahl, &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;; Barone &amp; Mocetti, &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;). The importance of the topic seems to be even greater under the current Covid-19 pandemic. It has been noted that low trust in governments may lead to vaccine hesitancy (SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;), which might have lowered the coverage of Covid-19 vaccination in many countries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In order to identify the effects of income inequality on various aspects of trust, Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. construct an impressive dataset comprising various surveys, such as the World Value Survey, the National Socioeconomic Survey (Susenas), Village Census (PODES), and village-level data on estimated poverty and inequality (PovertyMap). Using the informative dataset, Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. reveal statistically significant negative correlations between district-level inequality and trust in political and state institutions. On the other hand, they also find that higher village-level inequality has a negative effect on trust in strangers. The estimation results are intuitively consistent, and Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. provide a useful perspective on the relationship between inequality and trust in Indonesia, though there appear to be some issues that still need to be cleared up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, their cross-section analysis might induce an endogeneity problem. Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. employ ordinary least squares results with reference to endogeneity test outcomes (Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;.'s table A.2), which depend on the assumption that their instrumental variable is valid and strong. As Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. are cautious about the results of their analysis, I am still afraid that the inequality variables correlate with the error term (endogeneity). For example, I am concerned that Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. do not control for ethnic diversity among villages in the empirical specifications, while ethnic heterogeneity displays a strong negative correlation with the extent to which people trust each other (Gustavsson &amp; Jordahl, &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;; Jordahl, &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, in line with the literature, Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. assume that respondents are well acquainted with the objective level of income inequality in their districts and villages. In other words, this means that the subjective perception of inequality is supposed to coincide with, or at least be proportional to, the objective inequality index, but it seems quest","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"95-96"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12407","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50125489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “Siamese Twin Failures: Structural and Regulatory Transformations in Unequal Thailand”","authors":"Pasuk Phongpaichit","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12406","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Kanchoochat (&lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;) takes an institutional approach to explaining the persistence of inequality, poverty, and low growth rates in Thailand over recent decades. He focuses on two institutional transformations: a “structural transformation,” meaning a move away from agriculture, and a “regulatory transformation,” meaning efficiency-enhancing reforms in public administration, decentralization, anti-monopoly policies, and taxation. Kanchoochat argues that the high-growth countries of East Asia, especially Taiwan and South Korea, achieved these two transformations, resulting in higher growth and declining inequality, while Thailand has failed. This is a succinct, elegant, and original approach to an important issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the structural transformation, Kanchoochat has excellent charts showing the extent of Thailand's failure compared to other Asian countries to move people out of agriculture and to improve productivity. He attributes this failure to two causes: government subsidies of inefficient agriculture, especially since the 1990s, and the continuing role of the farm as a form of social security in the absence of state provision. He suggests that ending subsidies and constructing a comprehensive social security system would overcome the problem. While I would welcome these reforms, I doubt they would achieve a “transformation,” because I think other factors are important in sustaining this inefficient agricultural sector. Most important of all, access to and use of land, the single most important input into agricultural production, is still lumbered with many restrictions. Around 60% of land is still ultimately controlled by government. Large areas are not available for economic use, and others have restrictions on their use (Cripps, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). Without a far-reaching reform of the tenure system, the potential of agriculture will not be realized. Another restraining factor is the very low rate of public investment in agriculture over the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the regulatory transformation, Kanchoochat shows how moves toward democratization, decentralization, and progressive polices on tax and competition foundered on the intransigence of the “traditional elite,” meaning the military, and segments of the bureaucracy, professions, and politically connected entrepreneurs. This alliance created a new institutional framework featuring appointed bodies and the judicial system which blocked or reversed reforms. Kanchoochat argues that change requires a larger role for electoral institutions and a “new social contract” under which citizens will agree to pay more tax and entrepreneurs will be happy with less monopoly. But it is not clear what social forces might drive such changes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kanchoochat, following North, Aoki, and others, argues that institutions are created by human will to form a stable structure for the conduct of everyday life. According to this definition, institutions are susceptible to change but there is a tend","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"69-70"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12406","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50122513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on “How Inequality Affects Trust in Institutions: Evidence from Indonesia”","authors":"Hal Hill","doi":"10.1111/aepr.12405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12405","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;. (&lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;) is an ambitious and innovative paper. Highlighting the importance of trust as a key ingredient in the process of economic and political development, the authors examine the impact of inequality on trust, and by extension institutions, at the village and district levels in Indonesia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The paper has several distinctive features. First, the authors carefully disaggregate the concept of institutions, into economic, social, and political (“the state”) dimensions, plausibly conjecturing that each of these may have different behavioral relationships to the key variables of interest. Second, the analysis is also geographically disaggregated. This adds richness to the study given that Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state. Third, they introduce an intermediate variable in the analysis, education, finding that more highly educated individuals' trust in the political and state institutions is more sensitive to higher inequality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The authors' main conclusions are reassuring. In general, the levels of trust are high (Suryahadi &lt;i&gt;et al&lt;/i&gt;.'s figures 2 and 3), in some cases arguably higher than might have been expected, and mostly rising. Not surprisingly, trust is particularly high for social ties. Evidently, the village respondents are least trusting only toward “strangers.” Financial institutions enjoy high trust; one might surmise that the absence of any major bank crashes in Indonesia this century might contribute to this finding. Trust in governments and the civil service is very high, approaching 80% in 2018. This is perhaps a little unexpected given the endless “coffee shop” discussions of corruption. Nevertheless, in discussing their figure 5 the authors add an important qualifier, that “lower trust does not pertain to political institutions like elections or the parliament, but more on state apparatus.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions to the conclusion of high trust include that across religious communities, not a major surprise in view of the country's occasional religious tensions, and some decline in the press and media, which is a global phenomenon in this era of proliferating “fake news.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The finding that trust is comparatively high is also of interest given Indonesia's inequality outcomes. Historically expenditure inequality was moderately low, but it has risen significantly for much of this century. Not surprisingly, therefore, the authors conclude that keeping inequality “in check” is important for healthy institutional development.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have several comments on this fine paper, which might be explored in future work on the subject. First, it would be interesting to set out some analytical “priors,” of what one might hypothesize to be the likely relationships. For example, Indonesia has had episodes of quite serious conflict over the past 50 years, including ongoing unrest in the two Papua provinces (which presumably were not in the survey). But they have generally been co","PeriodicalId":45430,"journal":{"name":"Asian Economic Policy Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"92-94"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aepr.12405","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50153864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}