East-West Center in the News

(2012-03-20) Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Institute in Hawaii, notes it is typical for North Korea to follow international agreements with provocations. He says the space launch announcement demonstrates little has changed under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, who succeeded his father after Kim Jong Il's death in December.

"This latest development leads outside observers to conclude even more strongly that it's as if Kim Jong Il is still running North Korea's foreign policy from the grave," Roy said. "There's been no appreciable change in virtually all of the policies that we learned to loathe under the Kim Jong Il regime."

(2012-03-31) The government’s efforts to improve human development have failed due to the lack of vision and absence of long-term planning.

This was said by East-West Centre Governance and Democracy Initiative Asia-Pacific Director Shabbir Cheema at a lecture on “Governance for human development” organised by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) on Friday.

“Weak governance is responsible for persistent poverty and lagging human development in Pakistan,” he said, adding that the country needs continuity of the democratic process, strong civil society, hard economic decisions and increased internal revenue generation to improve the situation.

Unfortunately, the government’s efforts at improving human development failed due to the absence of competence and commitment from political and bureaucratic managers, he said. The strong feudal culture that influences governance in the country did not help matters either, he added.

“Democratic governments cannot survive if they do not build and sustain the trust of citizens, which is difficult to build and easy to lose in this age of information,” he added.

He said a governance crisis is evidenced by widespread corruption, inefficient public services and a host of other failures.

(2012-04-04) "It is common in China that regional officials are able to get away with a lot," Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Center, told Trend Lines. "They take the law into their own hands and are like mini-dictators: They are highly corrupt, help their friends and punish their enemies. They're not exactly public servants."

Given the size of the country, Roy explained, the central government is not able to oversee its provincial and local governments, which leads to problems of enforcement.

"It has always been a challenge in China to keep regional officials in line, and it has never been a flawless system," he said. "There is a tradition of regions feigning compliance with the central government, while to a large degree doing their own thing, and it is extremely difficult to bring all of the parts of such a big country into conformity."

Effective supervision of regional governments to ensure their compliance would require an investment that the central government in Beijing simply cannot afford, Roy said.

"They'd have to hire an army of overseers, and even then, once the overseers were sent away, they might get co-opted by local officials into taking a cut [for not accurately reporting] to the central government," he said.