Cambodia and Thailand relations

Lwin Lwin Aung, 2016, IUJ

Introduction

            In the past three decades, the relationships between Cambodia and Thailand sometime are good and bad due to domestic politics of these two counties and the border and the Preah Vihear temple issues between them. Cambodia and Thailand are situated in Southeast Asia region and ASEAN member countries. These two countries are neighboring countries and also ASEAN member countries. The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between Cambodia and Thailand since 1953. This paper cannot provide information of historical events before 1950s. Instead, it focuses on the significant events after post-World War II era. In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. After getting Cambodia’s independence, Cambodia firstly started the diplomatic relations with Thailand. And also, Thailand was the first country to recognize Cambodia as an independence state.

China-ASEAN Relations

Lwin Lwin Aung, 2016, IUJ

Introduction

            Nowadays, all nations want to emphasize their national interest and resort to a wide range of ways and means to get the upper hand. And then, globalization as development in Information Technology as has bridged the gap between nations, forcing the nations to abandon their closed-door policy with the result to improve political, economic and social cooperation. The United States and the Soviet Union carried out cold war at the end of World War II. In South East Asia region, some nations want to prevent the intervention of superpower countries and to cooperate with another nation in the region.

Cambodia-Thailand Border Conflict

Lwin Lwin Aung, 2016, IUJ

1. Introduction

Nowadays, there are many conflicts all over the world. They have different origins, different general trends and different interests. Some conflicts are the result from economic interests of the states, territorial invasions and transnational crimes like genocide, discrimination based on race, gender, terrorism, and ethic cleaning. Conflicts between states can be divided into four groups. These are geopolitik, realpolitik, idealpolitik and kapitalpolitik conflicts[1]. The border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand are the one of geopolitik conflict that based on territories and borders. And also, this conflict is one category of interstate conflicts.

Windows Opportunity of the Budget Reform of Myanmar Budget Deficit and Lack of Transparency

 Thet Mar Aye, Win Thiri Myaing, Myo Min Thein, Thet Naing Zaw, 2016, IUJ

Abstract

This paper studies the reforming regarding budget and their importance budgetary policies and financial management tools in Myanmar. In the current economic climate, government are starting to pay more attention to efficient management regarding not only resources and allocation but also revenues and expenditures, for this purpose, we examine budgetary policies and financial management tool especially Medium Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF), reforming of State Own Enterprises (SEEs) and taxation at government level and try to examine expected new window of opportunity for succeeding budget deficit and lack of transparency during the new government of Myanmar. Thus, the budgetary reforming is the most important for current Myanmar situation.

Keywords: budget reform, lack of budget transparency, budget deficit, State Own Enterprises (SEEs)

Myanmar military's white paper highlights growing openness

March 28, 2016 4:20 pm JST

The low-profile publication by Myanmar's armed forces of a defense white Paper in February marked the first time that the Tatmadaw, as the military is known, released this type of strategy document to outsiders. The paper, which outlines the military's broad plans for the coming years, is markedly more comprehensive than the last defense policy statement, issued in 1999, and seems partly aimed at a foreign audience -- albeit a very limited one.

China's Policies on Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation

ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၁ ဇန္န၀ါရီ ၂၀၁၇ မွာ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံက ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ China's Policies on Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation ဆိုတဲ့ စကၠဴျဖဴစာတမ္း (white paper) ကို ဖတ္ၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့ အရင္က ဆိုဗီယက္ႀကီး လုပ္ခဲ့တာကို သြားသတိရမိတယ္။ ၁၉၆၉ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လဆန္းမွာ ထိုစဥ္က ဆိုဗီယက္ျပည္ေထာင္စုရဲ႕ အႀကီးအကဲ Brezhnev က Asian Collective Security (အာရွစုေပါင္းလံုၿခံဳေရး) ဆိုတဲ့ အဆိုတစ္ခု ျပဳခဲ့ဘူးတယ္။ ပညာရွင္အခ်ိဳ႕ကေတာ့ စစ္ေအးေခတ္ ပံုရိပ္ဆိုးဆိုး အေဖၚခံထားရတဲ့ ဆိုဗီယက္ပံုရိပ္ကို ေျပာင္းလဲျပစ္ဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္ပံုရတယ္လို႔ ဆိုၾကတယ္။ ဆိုဗီယက္က အဆိုျပဳခဲ့တဲ့ ဒီ collective security ဆိုတာဟာ to destroy Cold-War stereotypes of the Soviet Union as a menace and to demonstrate that cooperation with the Soviet leadership was indeed possible ဆိုၿပီး ပညာရွင္တစ္ဦးက ဆိုပါတယ္။

Streams and Stages: Case Study of Myanmar Peace Process

Nyi Nyi Aung Soe, Htet Aung, 2017, International University of Japan

Abstract

       This paper studies why Myanmar Peace Negotiation Process was dynamically triggered since 2011 and how far the policy formulating and decision making for those is running on the road map or political framework. This paper observes what the problems are challenging while negotiation on the political framework among the actors - the Government, Myanmar Armed Forces, and the Ethnic Armed Groups (EAGs) and shows how the foreign countries such as the United States, the neighbouring countries (China, Bangladesh, and Thailand) can influence on Myanmar Peace Process. This paper also explains what the differences between National Level Peace agreement and Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA). In terms of the current political climate, the government, however, enthusiastically emphasizes on National Reconciliation and Peace Process as the first prioritized, the international observers critique how the process brings the climax to a standstill or seems to be downward slope.  

Keywords:     Myanmar Peace Process, Conflict, Negotiation, Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), Political Framework, 21 Century Pinlong (Peace Conference)

Bilateral Relations between Myanmar and Thailand

Introduction

Both Myanmar and Thailand are situated in Southeast Asia. Thailand is the only country in Southeast Asia which never to have been taken over by a European power unlike Myanmar. In both countries, the military has been involved in politics. After the overthrow of a democratically elected government in recent years, Thailand has had several coups since the 1930s. Historically, coups in Thailand and Myanmar / Burma are different, in Thailand the army always gave back the power, while in Burma the coup of 1962 meant decades of tyranny.[1] The relations between Thailand and Myanmar have been distinguished by mutual criticism, border troubles and suspicion. The long complex history remained between Myanmar and Thailand because both countries are neighbours with each other. With the fall of Ayudhya, Myanmar was seemed as a devilish nation by Thaialnd. In 1569, Burmese troops invaded Ayudhya and occupied it for 34 years before the Siamese King Naresuan won the decisive battle in Nong Sarai and retook the capital city from Burma.[2] However, the Burmese King Bayinnaung scoured Ayudhya in 1767 again. The city fell again down to Burma after a protracted fight. This event has been etched in the memory of Thai and became the bitter history. In this essay, I would like to focus on “Whether the relations between Myanmar and Thailand is stable or not?” by examining the government to government relations after Myanmar gained her independence. Then, I will move on to the relations of both countries within ASEAN because of both countries are members of ASEAN.

Cross Country Comparison of Relation between Fertility Rate and Female Labor Force Participation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand the relation and mutual effect between female labor force participation and total fertility rates in developing and OECD countries in a cross-country panel dataset. It's finding a significant effect of the female labor force participation on fertility rate in both developing countries and OECD countries. First, this paper empirically discusses and presents a simulation model of the effect of female labor force participation on fertility rate relating with GDP per capita, Unemployment rate, and Infant Mortality rate. Second, this paper looks specifically comparing at both developing and OECD countries and analyzes the effect of female labor force participation on fertility in same cross-country panel dataset using the data from the World Bank 2015. Finally, female labor force participation is negatively related to fertility rate in developing countries and positively related in OECD countries.

Keywords: total fertility rate, infant mortality rate, female labor force participation rate, GDP per capita and both unemployment rate.

Causes of Japanese Structural Deflation and How Overcome Long-term Deflation

1.       Introduction

The Japanese economy has been underperforming for more than a decade. The average growth rate of real GDP over the past 12 years has been just above 1 percent, and the nominal GDP has been shrinking since 1997 due to deflation. In order to stimulate the stagnant economy, the government has cut taxes and increased expenditures. As a result the government debt/GDP ratio has risen to an unprecedented level for an advanced country in peacetime. The CPI has been declining since 1998, while the GDP deflator has been declining since 1995. Stock prices and land prices have been declining for the decade. There is no doubt that the economy is in deflation. The consumption tax rate increase and repeal of income tax cut in April 1997 is often regarded as a fiscal policy mistake. Slow structural reform in regulated sectors is another problem for the Japanese economy. The most likely cause for deflation in Japan is a failure of monetary policy, since inflation or deflation is ultimately a monetary phenomenon. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) was unable to stop the inflation rate from turning negative, despite its various efforts. The Bank of Japan’s actions were too little too late, at least in retrospect, in preventing deflation from emerging and fighting out of deflation.

How the Japanese Economy Could Overcome the Oil Crisis in the 1970s

Myo Min Thein, 2016, International University of Japan

Introduction
In the 1970s, the Japanese economy could overcome the oil crisis and successfully achieved high economy growth. So, what features are included in the behind of the Japanese economy development? In the case, I really emphasized the role of actors which are not only the Japanese government but also private sectors how much influenced and how to try the best for their economy growth in that period. During before the bubble state and after World War II, it generally consists of three postwar periods in Japan. There are “economy under the occupation (1945-1950), high economic growth (1951-1972), and oil crisis and adjustment period (1973-1985)” (Nakamura, 2004). So, what are contributed to the extraordinary performance of the Japanese economy during before and after the oil crisis?

            During the 1950s to 60s, due to the high economic growth of Japan, the Japanese economy strengthened supply-side economy and the government of Japan designed the mid-term and long-term strategy to guide vital investment activities in the private sectors, and it also called “post-war Japanese high growth miracle” (Katz, 1998). Especially, the government of Japan tried to handle the large demand for the Japanese products by recognized groups among the companies. Nevertheless, the high growth era was terminated in the early 1970s because of the Nixon shock and oil crisis. In 1971, the consequences of the Nixon shock, the US faced to hardly maintain their US Dollar base gold standard and also the international monetary system has shifted to the full-floating system. Therefore, the Japanese currency rate also increasingly appreciated from 36 yen/$ to 240 yen/$ during 1972 to 1985 shown in figure 4. Therefore, what I found a result that the export product of the Japan have been lost and it obviously faced price competition in the international market. Consequently, Japanese government terminated the long-term development plans and introduced efficient income policy in order to improve the hyperinflation.

State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s Speech on the Occasion of the One Year Anniversary of the Government

(30 March 2017)

To All the People of the Union, A year ago on 30 March 2016, the NLD Government took over the responsibilities of the State with a clear mandate given by the people in the multi-party general elections held in November 2015. Accordingly, we have a bounden duty to be accountable to the people. The respective Ministries at the Union level and the States level have shared with you their work priorities, implementation of those priorities, the challenges that remain and future direction they will be pursuing in serving the interest of the people. On my part, I would like to highlight three important matters. The first concerning “the change” that the NLD had promised in the campaign leading up to the elections. We need to review and assess how far we made good on that promise. When we say “change”, we are referring to two; “ changing the system” and “changing mind-set”.

Ministry of Defence in military and civil services in the time of the new government Performances in One-Year Period

The Ministry of Defence is committed to ensuring the new government elected by the people to be on the right track of democracy. The activities it has undertaken include environmental conservation, relief and resettlement in times of natural disaster, reopening of universities’ training corps, rural health care services and prevention of recruitment of minors into the army. 

Natural environment 

Natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally and the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. The natural environment is greatly modified into a simplified human environment. Man has changed landscapes to make urban settings and agricultural land, thereby resulting in gradual degradation of the environment in the period of over 50 years. Natural disaster and manmade disaster caused climate changes, thus triggering global warming, flood, landslide, earthquake, storm, forest fire and volcanic eruption. Therefore, different countries are extensively engaged in disaster reduction, alleviation of global warming and reforestation. Provisional services and regulating services are adoption of climate changes, carbonization, water and air purification, prevention of land erosion and landslide. 

Geopolitical Analysis of China’s Security Policy in Asia-Pacific

Myo Min Thein , 2017, International University of Japan

Introduction

In the past, China has significantly cooperated in regional security on specific issues. These include resolving in the Cambodia conflict, supporting and participating in East Timor by peacekeeping efforts, and trying to help further nuclear non-proliferation on the Korean peninsula and so on. Moreover, China has also initiated the anti-terrorism effort in Central Asia through the Shanghai Security Cooperation Agreement.[1]  Today, China has to become a most powerful nation in Asia. Economically, in 2013, the Chinese economy was approximately 60 % of the size of the U.S. economy.[2]  Many commentators believe that the Chinese economy will be closer to 80 % of the size of the U.S. economy in 2020. Due to the increasing of the economy, it will be possible for the Chinese government to divert substantial funds to high-technology projects in defence and other advanced technological endeavours. Typically, as the growing economy and China’s interest in the global distribution of power, China is going to be increasingly involved in East Asia and Asia-Pacific regional initiatives.[3] On January 2017, China explicated its position on Asia-Pacific security through its first white paper.[4]

So, the purpose of the study is to analysis the current China’s Security Policy in Asia-Pacific with the perspective of geopolitics, and the research question is how China’s security policy in Asia-Pacific does? This paper will focus on China’s Asia-Pacific security policy by using the geopolitical analysis, as well as will realise on the statecraft of China and its diplomatic behaviours in the Asia-Pacific region.