Indigenous Peoples are not at all mentioned or referred to in any ASEAN document, even though they are an integral part of the ASEAN Community and among its most vulnerable sectors, whose interest the ASEAN has committed itself to protect. The failure of the ASEAN to address the plight of its Indigenous Peoples despite its expressed commitment to human rights and social justice is a shortcoming that needs to be corrected urgently. Unless Indigenous Peoples are fully recognized as integral part of a culturally diverse ASEAN, and unless Indigenous ...

This paper was presented in the sixth China-ASEAN Forum on Social Development and Poverty Reduction, which was held on 26-27 September 2012 in Liuzhou, China. The forum was supported under the UNDP-IPRCC project. Southeast Asia and China together constitute nearly half of the total global ethnic minority population. This chapter will address the challenge of the development of ethnic minority groups in the ASEAN region, and China

The 10 states of Southeast Asia have combined to form the developing world’s most successful and durable regional grouping, the Association of Southeast Asian Na-tions, ASEAN. Economic integration among them is high and increasing. The ambi-tious ASEAN Economic Community is scheduled to take effect from December 2015, and should further accelerate this integration. But the socio-economic and institution-al disparities among them are also very large. This paper therefore asks the ques-tion, does it make sense to contemplate a ‘Southeast Asian ...

This paper provides an overview of research on income inequality in China over the period of economic reform. It presents the results of two main sources of evidence on income inequality and, assisted by various decompositions, explains the reasons income inequality has increased rapidly and the Gini coefficient is now almost 0.5. This paper evaluates the degree of income inequality from the perspectives of people’s subjective well-being and government concerns. It poses the following question: has income inequality peaked? It also discusses the ...

This chapter investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries. We discuss conceptual and methodological issues – including alternative definitions of the global distribution, the use of household surveys and national accounts data, the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates, and the incorporation of recently available data on top incomes from income tax records. We ...

This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and ...

A statistical publication released on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration establishing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Since its foundation in 1967, ASEAN has made extraordinary progress in preserving peace and security, promoting economic co-operation and integration as well as social development. This publication presents a collection of statistical indicators from ASEANstats’ databases, and highlights the main findings observed to showcase the evolution and progress of ASEAN over the past decades