In the 1960s, the escudo zone, comprising Portugal and its African colonies, countered the trend of European decolonization. The Portuguese state reorganized monetary relations in the empire-state with the help of a new legal framework. The aim of this imperial economic reorganization was to establish a balance of payment relations which was expected to facilitate Portugal’s economic modernization and the country’s association with liberalizing economies in Western Europe that were experiencing rapid economic growth. However, the escudo zone soon became dysfunctional. Mata explains why the designs of economy building in a Portuguese empire-state could not be realized, given the trend toward independent political and economic development in Lusophone Africa.

This article charts and analyses the change path and various transformations of Malaysia’s state-owned enterprise, the Federal Land Development Agency, from its establishment in the 1960s to the present. The analysis supports arguments that the model of the developmental state, based on planned public/private cooperation, provides an alternative policy prescription to that of sole reliance on the self-regulating market. The Federal Land Development Agency is shown not only to have survived but also to have thrived as an economic development arm of the Malaysian state, successfully adapting to the changing environment in which it operates. To delineate the changes, a framework of punctuated equilibrium is utilised as it best captures the instances of rapid discontinuous change and the periods of incremental change and relative stability.

South Korea has been faced with a widening economic gender gap during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. To inform discussion of Korean women’s future following the pandemic, this article explores the country’s history of women’s empowerment. It identifies cultural, educational, economic, and political changes, and their long-term effects on women’s role and status. The analysis is based on data collected from Korea’s national statistical database and a review of relevant literature. Findings inform policy directions for advancing women’s economic empowerment in Korea and other countries following a similar development path and contribute to expanding our understanding of the factors and relations influencing women’s empowerment.

This article examines the role of government in Malaysia’s history of economic development. In addressing two key challenges – inter-ethnic inequalities, conflicts and tensions, and exposure to global trade and economic relations – the Malaysian government has become directly involved in the economy. Strong government has played a role in Malaysia’s economic success in a range of ways, from 5-year plans to specific industry promotion and the creation of organisations for particular economic development purposes. Government has also been aware of environmental changes and in response has modified its strategies, established new organisations and invested in innovative ventures. Thus, while the drivers of economic development in Malaysia have been deeply embedded structural phenomena, the actual economic development path taken has been determined by the actions of the Malaysian government in concert with other stakeholders.

This discussion paper by a group of scholars across the fields of health, economics and labour relations argues that COVID-19 is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis from which there can be no return to the ‘old normal’. The pandemic’s disastrous worldwide health impacts have been exacerbated by, and have compounded, the unsustainability of economic globalisation based on the neoliberal dismantling of state capabilities in favour of markets. Flow-on economic impacts have simultaneously created major supply and demand disruptions, and highlighted the growing within-country inequalities and precarity generated by neoliberal regimes of labour market regulation. Taking an Australian and international perspective, we examine these economic and labour market impacts, paying particular attention to differential impacts on First Nations people, developing countries, women, immigrants and young people. Evaluating policy responses in a political climate of national and international leadership very different from those in which major twentieth century crises were addressed, we argue the need for a national and international conversation to develop a new pathway out of crisis.

India’s phenomenal service-led growth in recent decades has generated debate on the role of services vis-à-vis manufacturing as the engine of growth. With the rapidly increasing importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in global production systems since the 1990s, there have been claims of services having developed a growth dynamism similar to manufacturing. This article examines the role of services in India’s growth process using the concept of inter-sectoral linkages to make comparison with the role of manufacturing. Input-Output linkages and time series analysis reveal that services have been much less integrated in India’s production structure than manufacturing. They were also less important in generating indirect employment spillovers through sectoral linkages, compared with manufacturing. Service sector growth is found to be autonomously driven by final demand and therefore less dependent on its interconnections with the rest of the economy from the production side. The findings also indicate that service sector growth has stimulated manufacturing growth but not vice versa. However, the impact of services on manufacturing from the demand-side is neither sustainable nor desirable going forward. India is in urgent need of strategically developing its manufacturing sector through integrating dynamic services like ICT and internalising productivity gains. At the same time measures to address India’s inequality are critical to broaden the country’s demand base and make the growth process more sustainable and inclusive. In this sense, inequality reduction is a prerequisite for growth and should not be seen as an alternative to it.

The use of exchange rates based on Purchasing Power Parities to compare incomes across countries and over time has now become standard practice. But there are reasons to believe that this could lead to excessively inflated incomes for poorer countries and in some cases also inflate the extent of real changes over time. Estimates of gross domestic product growth in the Chinese and Indian economies in recent years provide examples of this.

This article deals with the rehabilitation of economies in post-conflict states, paying particular attention to the role played by the state in this process. Using the example of Cambodia and its policies on rice production and export, the article shows the prominent role that may be played by the state in prioritised areas of economic development where there has been market failure. In the Cambodian case, the government targeted rice production and export as these had great potential for promoting the major aims of national development policy – economic growth and poverty alleviation. Using a whole-of-government approach and a combination of direct involvement and the creation of an enabling environment, the government appears to have contributed to vastly increased rice production and export.

Increased access to defensible material wealth is hypothesised to escalate inequality. Market integration, which creates novel opportunities in cash economies, provides a means of testing this hypothesis. Using demographic data collected from 505 households among the matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo in 2017, we test whether market integration is associated with increased material wealth, whether increased material wealth is associated with wealth inequality, and whether being in a matrilineal vs. patrilineal kinship system alters the relationship between wealth and inequality. We find evidence that market integration, measured as distance to the nearest source of tourism and primary source of household income, is associated with increased household income and ‘modern’ asset value. Both village-level market integration and mean asset value were associated negatively, rather than positively, with inequality, contrary to predictions. Finally, income, modern wealth and inequality were higher in matrilineal communities that were located closer to the centre of tourism and where tourism has long provided a relatively stable source of income. However, we also observed exacerbated inequality with increasing farm animal value in patriliny. We conclude that the forces affecting wealth and inequality depend on local context and that the importance of local institutions is obscured by aggregate statistics drawn from modern nation states.

We examine how the composition of residential energy consumption and its sensitivity with respect to income changes. The paper characterizes the energy transition, analyzing the behavior of income elasticity of energy demand along the economic development stages by fuel types. The results indicate a nonlinear relationship between income and domestic energy consumption that can be explained by two factors. First, along the income distribution, consumption of modern fuels increases, replacing traditional and transitional fuels until modern fuels drive all of the growth in domestic energy demand. Second, at the highest income levels, income elasticity starts to decrease, leading to concavity in energy consumption. That is, the income elasticity of residential energy demand follows an inverse U-shape along the world income distribution. This finding suggests that at high income levels, residential energy consumption shows satiation and net energy-saving effects.