Introduction

For several reasons it is likely that the two years of 1991 and 1992 will receive more than a footnote in economic and political history later on. During these two years important political decisions were taken in virtually every part of the globe, thereby moving countries and economies away from a stalemate situation of uncertainty. In Europe, the Maastricht agreements signalled the further deepening of both political and economic integration while the agreements on the European Economic Space and the so-called Europe Agreements with Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR), and Poland fixed the conditions for integration widening. At the same time the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by an extremely fragile, heterogeneous and probably non-durable construction called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

In the Americas, the foundation of a “regionalist” economic strategy was laid with the beginning of negotiations on the Southern enlargement of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) between the United States and Mexico. In the Middle East, the UN-supported military engagement to end the occupation of Kuwait reflected a renaissance of global political co-ordination. It has found its economic counterpart in the annual G-7 meetings as well as in the endeavours to cope with global environmental problems (such as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED]) by setting world-wide binding limits to the use of the earth as a sink.

Finally, in East and Southeast Asia the need to co-ordinate macroeconomic policies on a broad regional level was felt more strongly than ever before. Such co-ordination will come to new horizons when China begins to implement what it declared in 1992, that is to further deepen and widen the opening of its market. On a subregional level in Asia, the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) brought an end to its 25-year rule of not committing itself to binding economic targets and schedules. It announced a Free Trade Area that was to be finalized within 15 years.

In the course of the reparations negotiations, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Japanese policy towards Southeast Asia came to be viewed as an economic stepping-stone back into the region. Furthermore, Japan's economic aid, although marginal in its volume and initiated largely due to external pressure in the late 1950s, was characterized by strict conditions and tied loans. As in the case of the reparations payments, Japan's aid policy was employed to promote foreign trade. As a result, in 1964 Japan's trade with the Southeast Asian region as a whole surpassed that of the United States, becoming first or second in importance in the trade of nearly every single country in the region.

Japan's post-war economic growth has been phenomenal since the early 1960s. Rapid expansion of the Japanese economy has raised expectations and attracted accolades while at the same time generating considerable apprehension, resentment and criticism. In some instances, Japan's economic growth by the mid-1960s appeared to have occurred at the expense of other countries. As a price for its rapid economic penetration, Japan had to confront a serious blow in the form of boycott movements against Japanese goods in the early 1970s. Anti-Japanese movements in 1974 thus became the catalyst in forging a new relationship between Japan and Southeast Asia.

Japan's Southeast Asian policy began to loom large in its economic diplomacy during the Hayato Ikeda (1960–64) administration. Following Kishi's first official visit to the region; Ikeda visited Southeast Asia twice in 1961 and 1963 and tried to play a mediating role in the Indonesia-Malaysia conflict, although his main focus was on Japan's domestic economy, that is, an income-doubling policy. Southeast Asia thus gained renewed interest in Japan's foreign policy. At the same time, Southeast Asia began a quest for regional identity and co-operation. Consequently, intra-regional interactions became more pronounced and inter-regional contacts increased, particularly with the major powers. It was these changing environments surrounding Japan that had a significant impact upon the foreign policies of Southeast Asia and the major powers.

As mentioned in the preceding chapters, the level of trade between Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries is still low by international standards although its trade, especially import trade, has been growing rapidly from 1980/ 81 to 1990/91. From Myanmar's perspective, its trade with Southeast Asia is substantial; but from the viewpoint of Southeast Asian nations, this trade is nominal in relation to their trade with the rest of the world. To Myanmar, the ASEAN market is second only to that of the “other Asian countries”, comprising mainly China, Japan, and India. Of all the Southeast Asian nations, Singapore is Myanmar's biggest trading partner, followed by Thailand. The smallest trading partners, Vietnam and the Philippines, remain the least important in Myanmar's foreign trade, while Indonesia's trade with Myanmar has dropped substantially because of Indonesia's successful Green Revolution and Myanmar's supposed self-sufficiency in oil in the early 1980s. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have hardly any trade with Myanmar as they have never been important trading partners of Myanmar, probably because of former colonial ties. During the period under study, the balance of trade between Myanmar and Southeast Asia has almost always been in Myanmar's favour.

The generally low level of trade between Myanmar and Southeast Asia may be attributed to factors in contemporary history and the political economy of Myanmar and other Southeast Asian states which have influenced the degree of openness of their economies and thus the level of trade.

Southeast Asia can be sub-divided into ASEAN on the one side, and the Indochinese socialist nations on the other, with Myanmar belonging to neither side. Politically, ASEAN leans towards the West whereas the Indochinese states lean towards the East. Another point to note is that Myanmar is strictly a neutral country: it pulled itself out of the non-aligned movement when it felt that the movement had deviated from its original principles. From 1962 to 1988 Myanmar adopted a form of socialism defined in Myanmar nationalist terms.

Since the beginning of 1975 approximately 180,000 Indochinese immigrants have settled in Australia. Although these Indochinese immigrants come from the same geographical region, they derive from a wide diversity of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and status groups.

Presently, there is not only a general misunderstanding about the number of Indochinese immigrants in Australia, but also a lack of awareness of the socio-economic characteristics of these communities. This chapter presents a preliminary analysis of some of the readily available socio-economic data from the 1986 Australian census of population and housing relating to the Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese-born communities in Australia. In an attempt to place the data analysis for the Indochinese-born communities into perspective, comparable data on the “Other Asian”, “Other Overseas”, and Australian-born populations will also be presented. The “Other Asian” category includes the non-Indochinese countries of Southeast Asia, as well as the East, South and West (or Middle Eastern) Asian countries. There were 122,994 persons born in the Middle Eastern countries that were enumerated in the 1986 census, and these accounted for 28.4 per cent of the “Other Asian” category. The main Middle Eastern birthplace groups were Lebanon (56,341 persons), Turkey (24,529) and Cyprus (23,643), which accounted for 85.0 per cent of the total number of Middle Eastern-born persons enumerated in the 1986 census. The “Other Overseas” category refers to the non-Asian countries.

The principal aim of this chapter is to examine data on the labour force status, occupation, industry, and individual income of the three Indochinese-born communities. The data presented here have been extracted from the 1986 census microfiche tabulations, and show that the Indochinese-born communities exhibit a high labour force participation rate. Yet, among them there is a very high unemployment rate. At the same time, the majority of the Indochinese-born workers may be found in blue-collar occupations within the manufacturing industry sector. These attributes contribute to the low overall incomes of the Indochinese communities.

The 13 September election inherited a number of electoral mechanisms initiated for the 22 March election to make the polls cleaner and fairer. In the March election, there were a number of significant changes, such as improvement in the election law, the establishment of a polls-monitoring body, PollWatch. The efforts were geared first and foremost to prevent vote-buying, which has always been rampant in Thailand's elections. Vote-buying can take many forms, the most direct of which is candidates giving voters money in exchange for votes. A study has shown that the amount of money involved ranges from 30 to 500 baht per vote, depending on how rich the candidates are and how competitive the contest is. Besides vote-buying, there are other forms of illegal activities — undertaken by canvassers for politicians — which have been known to compromise the standard of the electoral process in the past. These include organizing feasts for potential voters, arranging tours for canvassers both in Thailand and abroad, contributing to temples, schools, and so forth, “betting schemes” whereby voters are encouraged to support a particular candidate through placing bets on losers and winners, and providing transport to take voters to polling booths on election day.

With regard to legal change, first of all the Interior Ministry since the March 1992 election has raised the ceiling on the amount of money a candidate can spend, from 350,000 to one million baht. Its reasoning was that it was impractical to limit spending to only 350,000 baht when the actual cost for a candidate to run in an election was much higher. The one-million-baht limit pleased those who wanted to be strictly law-abiding but felt that certain expenses had to be incurred.

The Interior Ministry has also changed the election law to make the election more transparent so that it is more difficult for illegal activities to slip through, particularly those relating to vote-buying.

From Thailand to Israel, discussions on distance education focus on quality. With the maturing of distance education has come rapid recognition of the need of quality to satisfy the educational demands of persons and needs of nations. The concern for quality in education, particularly in higher education, is expressed in most policy and planning documents and recurs even in the best of institutions.

The question often asked is: For distance education, is relevance going to be the criterion for quality? For most open university programmes in Asia and developing countries, courses offered are, by and large, need-based. Nearly 85 per cent of the 150,000 students of Sukothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU) in Thailand are working adults, and the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad (AIOU) lays strong emphasis on the training of primary school teachers, literacy workers and village leaders side by side with its degree programmes.

There is a tendency to compare distance learning universities and conventional universities. Doubts are often expressed over the quality of print and media materials of the courses and concern is expressed for the levels of achievement attained in distance education. Such reactions are understandable, but there is no evidence to show that one approach is necessarily superior to the other. Indeed, it is reported that STOU graduates are doing equally well and in a few instances better than graduates of conventional universities in postgraduate entrance examinations.

Quality is relative. Nevertheless, maintaining quality must be a long-term perspective. Short-term gains in “mass education” where the numbers game is evidence of success must not overshadow the need for quality.

In the consideration for quality, there is need to ensure that it is practised at several levels:

1. (a) development of materials, i.e., the content of delivery;

2. (b) modes of delivery;

3. (c) student support systems;

4. (d) training of personnel;

5. (e) monitoring and evaluation.

Introduction

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was founded in August 1967 in response to the threat of communism in Indochina. Although a stated goal of the Bangkok Declaration and many of the succeeding ASEAN pronouncements was to “accelerate economic growth … through joint endeavours”, and to “promote active collaboration and mutual assistance on matters of common interest in the |field of economics]”, little concrete action was taken to promote economic co-operation. In fact until 1977, regional Economic Ministers failed to meet on a regular basis; ASEAN had rotated around the annual meeting of its Foreign Ministers. Yet, despite the neglect, the ASEAN economies have all prospered.

This paper addresses the question of ASEAN economic co-operation and integration from a politico-economic framework. The primary question asked is: is the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) the aberration that it appears to be from the slow and reluctant progress of ASEAN economic co-operation over the past twenty-five years? If so, why is this the case? The changing political and economic environments in Southeast Asia are the principal factors positively affecting the attitude of the ASEAN leaders towards co-operation. Although scepticism persists over the will of ASEAN leaders to make due on their promises, evidence suggests that economic co-operation has become less of a political liability.

At the macro level the ASEAN leaders are in a stag hunt situation where all can gain through co-operation; if one party pursues its narrow national interests outside of a regional context, however, the others may lose relatively and absolutely. In the past, the gains from co-operation were perceived to be minimal, thus the ASEAN states were not compelled to co-operate with genuine conviction. But as the gains from co-operation are perceived to increase, the opportunity cost of not participating grows and co-operation becomes more attractive.

As mentioned earlier, most open universities teach humanities and for a time it was considered difficult to teach science-based subjects through distance learning. This problem was solved by the introduction of Home Science Kits which are used in conjunction with teaching materials for the Sciences. Yet another approach has been to utilize laboratory space available at existing institutions to conduct intensive science practicals. This can be done if the students have travel access to the centres, i.e., in city-based situations.

This is the age of technology. To stay at the cutting edge of education, distance education universities cannot ignore the challenge of teaching technology. Some open universities like the Open University of Israel have developed an electronic teaching kit which is sent on loan to all electrical and electronic engineering students. Others like the UK Open University have worked out inexpensive computer loan schemes for their computer studies students. With available hardware at their finger tips, it has been possible to teach these subjects from the distance. Because of the time-lag between course and equipment development in areas of rapid growth, as in computer science, often the distance learning courses are a little less current than what is available. Nevertheless, this issue can easily be addressed now that open universities have managed to find solutions to the problems of bringing the sciences, engineering skills and computer technology to the student in his own home.

For countries with highly developed communication systems, through use of interactive computer modems, communicating with tutors will be easy and teaching of engineering through computer screens may prove more effective than the conventional lecture techniques.

Distance education is only beginning to look seriously into the teaching of science and technology. This is an exciting area – an area that open universities in Asia should keep abreast of. The future lies in the area of technological advancement and it augurs well for open universities in Asia to start or expand in this area to bring technology education to more people.