Persistent Developmental Limits to Devising Policy Innovation for Innovation Policies in Emerging Economies

Promising industrial profiles of Southeast Asian emerging economies have met their developmental limits in the face of the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s. However, following the crisis, they have not been successful in upscaling the technological competitiveness of their industries. By applying the national innovation system approach originally developed in advanced western economies as an institutional mechanism of policy innovation in light of developmentalism, I seek to explain these persistent developmental limits in Malaysia and Indonesia. My qualitative research examines literature discussing policy coordination mechanisms in innovation policies and policy documents containing coordination mechanisms involving firms, universities, and government agencies; then, how these issues implicate innovation policies in the two countries. I employ a comparative institutional analysis between them focusing on institutional characteristics of the national innovation systems, specifically their institutional obstacles occurring within development paths amidst prevailing political environments. I suggest that persistent developmental limits in Malaysia and Indonesia result from systemic failures of achieving developmental aims regardless of their politico-administrative regimes. Existing institutional frameworks of the national innovation systems, entrenched in the socio-economic prevalence of the two countries, have not fit the nations’ developmental aims pursued upon innovation upgrading.

A framework to harness effective partnerships for the sustainable development goals

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) offer a broad, holistic framework of interdependent economic, social, and environmental objectives to enable integrated and collaborative approaches to their implementation. A key obstacle for operationalizing such an approach is knowing the right actors to engage on specific challenges. It is acknowledged that linkages across sectors, scales, and actors could provide an evidence base to assess and forge participation in multistakeholder partnerships for implementation. However, technical tools that could help to identify relevant actors and discussions of institutional arrangements to bring these actors on board are notably lacking in the extant literature. To support an evidence-based and systematic approach to coalition building that accounts for synergies and trade-offs across goals and targets, this paper proposes broad-based partnerships and a framework that lead actors can use to help harness collaborative SDG implementation: (1) define the partnership’s scope, (2) identify the main interlinkages, (3) assign responsibilities, (4) select the best available indicators, (5) assess the challenges, and (6) forge a broad-based partnership. After describing key decisions at each step, the article discusses applications of the proposed analytic partnership-building framework to problems that warrant the approach at global, regional, and national levels covering issues such as policy coordination across line ministries, global partnerships for SDG13 implementation in SIDS, energy compacts for SDG7 implementation, and integrated multilateral responses to crises.

4. The Council of the European Union:

The Council is an institution of day-to-day policymaking in which the interests of member state governments are represented by cabinet ministers who meet, according to their policy portfolio, in different Council configurations and within the Eurogroup. According to the Treaty of Lisbon, the Council has a dual mandate. It acts as a legislative organ as well as an executive and policy-coordinating institution. This dual role is reflected in the organization and meeting practices of the different Council configurations. Those groupings of ministers dealing primarily with executive decisions and policy coordination tend to meet more often and are regarded as being more senior than those formations of the Council which engage predominantly in legislative decision-making. As a legislative institution, the Council has increasingly acquired features of an upper chamber in a bicameral separation of powers system, working in tandem with the European Parliament. In contrast, Council decision-making relating to executive issues and policy coordination in important policy domains, such as economic governance and foreign policy, is closely aligned with the European Council. In these areas, the Council can be considered to constitute, together with the Commission, a collective EU executive.

Key dimensions of crises in the EU: contemporary aspects

Purpose. The aim of the article is to describe the main factors of crisis phenomena in the development of the European integration process. Methodology. The methodology involves a comprehensive study of theoretical and practical material on this subject, as well as formulation of relevant conclusions and recommendations. The following methods of scientific cognition were used in the research process: dialectical, terminological, formal and logical, comparative and legal, system and functional methods. Results. Transformation processes in the EU serve as a manifestation of global economic and information development. The crisis in the euro area was largely due to the peculiarities of its economic and institutional organization, in particular, the conditions for the free movement of capital and the lack of policy coordination in other sectors of the economy. Until now, measures in the field of economic governance in the EU have been largely ineffective due to their recommendatory nature and the lack of a legal obligation for EU Member States to comply with them. The crisis in the euro area and the EU in general has created favorable political conditions for deep institutional changes in the field of European integration. In particular, the dependence of EU countries on financial assistance from the ESM leads them to comply with the terms of the Fiscal Compact. At present, most EU political leaders consider deepening integration to be the key to securing the EU’s future economic growth and preventing future crises. In this context, the launch of a common fiscal policy is a significant step towards economic integration in the EU. Scientific novelty. The study found that most EU leaders are fully aware of the need for structural convergence, namely overcoming structural and cyclical differences among the economies of euro-area countries, as well as the main and secondary risks of divergence as a destructive phenomenon that can disrupt the established social, political, legal and economic order within the EU. Practical significance. Research materials can be used for comparative law studies.

THE IMPACT OF MACROECONOMIC POLICY ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN SUB-SAHARA AFRICAN COUNTRIES

The prime purpose of this article was to investigate the monetary and fiscal policy interaction and their impact on economic growth in a panel of 35 sub-Saharan African economies from 1980 to 2018. To achieve this objective, the study employs a Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) estimation technique. Using a PVAR approach, we show that an expansionary fiscal policy through tax revenue and an unexpected expansionary monetary policy via broad money supply have a positive effect on gross national income, whereas an expansionary fiscal policy through the government spending have a contractionary impact on gross national income. We also find that an unexpected expansionary monetary policy via real exchange rate has no effect on gross national income. Finally, we show evidence that there is a negative and significant relationship between fiscal policy and monetary policy and thus supporting the need of policy coordination between fiscal and monetary policies. Therefore, to have continuous and sustainable economic growth, the coordination of monetary and fiscal policies is vital, and the lack of this coordination leads to a sharp downturn of overall economic performance, even can hurt the economy The empirical results also show that the variation in gross national income is more explained by fiscal policy variables than monetary policy variables which show fiscal policy is more effective than monetary policy in influencing gross national income.

Regulatory regionalism and the limits of ASEAN banking integration: The case of Indonesia

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) aims to integrate the banking industry in the region. To achieve this, ASEAN members have agreed to create the ASEAN Banking Integration Framework (ABIF) to support such integration. Despite being endorsed in 2014, the framework remains vague and lacks clear policy coordination arrangements as well as standardisation instruments that enable ASEAN member states to integrate their banking sectors. This article examines why the member states agreed to such regulatory arrangements. Building upon the regulatory regionalism approach, we argue that the regulatory arrangement is underpinned by a socio-political struggle among dominant social forces in ASEAN. The article further argues that the political endeavour to internationalise domestic capital through the banking integration project remains problematic, given that local banking players seem to largely focus on protecting and penetrating domestic markets rather than regional expansion. This has hindered the progress of regional banking integration in ASEAN. To substantiate this argument, we use Indonesia’s engagement in the process as a case study. This article contributes to the study of political economies of banking integration outside of the European experiment by emphasising the importance of state–society relations in shaping the outcome of regional integration.