Civil Liberties and Gender Disparity in Educational Attainment

This study examines the relationship between civil liberties and gender disparity in educational attainment. We perform a dynamic panel data analysis using a unique panel dataset constructed from the Barro and Lee’s data on educational attainment and Freedom House’s data on civil liberties. The panel dataset covers 146 countries at five-year intervals from 1975 to 2015. One of the key findings is that, ceteris paribus, countries with higher levels of civil liberties tend to exhibit smaller levels of gender disparity in educational attainment. This implies that civil liberties may promote greater gender equality in educational attainment. It is observed also that gender disparity in educational attainment appears to follow a slight U-shaped pattern in relation to educational expansion, suggesting that the gender disparity initially decreases, but after reaching its lowest point at the mean years of education of around 8.6, it may begin to rise with further educational expansion

Educational Expansion and Declining Expenditure Inequality in Nepal over the Past Two Decades

Nepal has made significant progress in reducing inequality in economic well-being. Meanwhile education has expanded substantially. This study analyzes the role of educational expansion in reducing expenditure inequality using data from the three rounds of the Nepal Living Standards Survey. It conducts a two-stage hierarchical inequality decomposition analysis by location and education. The expansion of basic education in rural areas contributed significantly to reducing overall inequality. The government should further promote basic education, while improving its quality and enhancing the socio-economic status of households. The government should also develop socio-economic infrastructure and establish efficient transportation networks throughout the country

The Impacts of Mosquito Nets on Child Malaria Incidence in Timor-Leste

An effective malaria prevention strategy is crucial for improving child health outcomes and reducing the disease burden within communities. This study assessed the effectiveness of insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs) in reducing malaria incidence among children. The analysis used data from the 2014 Living Standards Survey in Timor-Leste and employed the instrumental variable (IV) method. The results show that each additional ITN increases the probability of net usage by 0.037 and reduces the probability of malaria incidence in children by 0.045. The findings emphasize the importance of expanding ITN distribution in malaria-endemic regions. By addressing the limited evidence on ITN effectiveness in developing Asian countries such as Timor-Leste, this research offers valuable insights for policymakers aiming to ensure sustainable and universal access to malaria prevention tools

Child Labor in Social Media: Exploring a Decade of YouTube Data

In this paper we explore the phenomenon of child labor, an important sustainability issue listed in the sustainable development goals (SDGs), via a novel approach by deploying machine learning tools of Python with data scrapped from popular social media YouTube. As a less investigated topic in the management field, our purpose of this study is to raise further awareness of child labor in the contemporary business context, with an issue largely omitted by international management and multinational companies, but profoundly rooted in developing countries and global supply chain. After the analysis of 11913 YouTube text data with Python machine learning tools, we deployed co-wording and squared multiple correlation technique to further explore the multiple variable relations for our further discussions of future research in this line

The Roles of Location and Education in Income Inequality: An Analytical Framework

This study develops a two-stage hierarchical inequality decomposition method as an analytical framework for the examination of the roles of rural/urban location and education in income inequality. It compares this method with a non-hierarchical inequality decomposition method. In the two-stage hierarchical inequality decomposition method, a hierarchical structure of a country is considered, where individuals are classified first into the rural and urban sectors and then into several education groups. Using the Theil indices, overall income inequality is decomposed hierarchically into the following three components: the between-sector, within-sector between-group, and within-sector within-group inequality components. The between-sector component evaluates income disparity between the rural and urban sectors, while the within-sector between-group component evaluates income inequality among the education groups, but adjusted for rural-urban differences in the structure of educational attainment. The within-sector within-group component assesses inequality within the education groups. In the non-hierarchical inequality decomposition method, overall income inequality is decomposed simultaneously but non-hierarchically based on individual attributes. In the context of location and education, overall income inequality, as measured by the Theil indices, is decomposed non-hierarchically into the following four components: the between-sector, between-group, location-education interaction, and within-sector within-group inequality components. The location-education interaction component assesses the extent of rural-urban differences in the income disparity among the education groups. It can take a negative value. Based on nation-wide household surveys, this study also presents the results of hierarchical and non-hierarchical inequality decomposition analyses for Indonesia and the Philippines

Urban and Rural Dimensions of Educational Inequality

This study introduces a method for the decomposition of the education Gini coefficient by location and examines the characteristics of this Gini decomposition method through the use of hypothetical examples. It empirically analyzes the determinants of educational inequality in some Asian countries using the Gini decomposition method. In a dual economy consisting of the rural and urban sectors, the education Gini coefficient can be additively decomposed into three distinct components: the within-sector, between-sector, and residual Gini components. The within-sector component measures educational inequality within the rural and urban sectors, while the between-sector component measures the rural-urban disparity in the mean level of educational attainment. The residual component assesses the extent of overlap between the rural and urban sectors in the distribution of educational attainment. In all selected Asian countries, including four ASEAN countries and three SAARC countries, the within-sector Gini component is a predominant determinant by accounting for 40-50% of the overall education Gini coefficient. There is a significant negative relationship between the between-sector component and the residual component in terms of their contributions to overall education Gini coefficient, indicating that the rural-urban overlap in the distribution of educational attainment rises as the rural-urban education disparity declines. When Bangladesh is excluded as an outlier, a significant positive relationship exists between mean years of education and the contribution of the residual component to overall education Gini coefficient, signifying that the rural-urban overlap in the distribution of educational attainment increases as mean years of education rises

Immortal (as long as political leadership is weak): The survival of Japanese government agencies 2001-2022

The post-war Japanese government was modernized according to the Westminster model, and, from 2000, began to reform its public agencies—known as “Incorporated Administrative Agencies” (IAAs)—in-line with the New Public Management model that was gaining global traction at the time. Despite the Western origin of such reforms, Japan’s political-administrative institutions have some unique features that set them aside from their Western counterparts while having parallels with other Asian countries. Therefore, we argue that it is essential to analyze how these local institutional factors affect organizational change inside government agencies in order to widen our understanding of transition in government bodies beyond Western contexts. Accordingly, this study addresses the following research questions: 1) What are the major forms of organizational transition in the case of Japan’s IAAs? 2) What are the major factors that determine their survival/death? 3) How do non-western features of government affect agency transition? 4) What is the role of political leadership in this context? To answer these questions, we developed a survival dataset of IAAs from 2001 to 2022, which includes key political and administrative variables. Our analysis suggests that political leaders (i.e., prime ministers) tend to pursue non-structural cosmetic transitions of agencies, such as renaming/rebranding, as part of broader public service reform packages. However, political longevity is an essential factor here, since leaders whose tenure is short tend to make little or no impact. Our findings shed light not only on the internal workings of the Japanese government, but also on the importance of local political realities in shaping patterns of agency transition, thus helping to broaden the scope of the research in this field beyond Western contexts

Fragile Democracy in times of the Pandemic in Myanamr: Democracy, Political Attitudes, and Political Behaviors

International University of Japan博士（公共経営学）/ PhD in Public Management2024thesi

Three Essays on Myanmar’s Public Budgetary Dynamics

International University of Japan博士（公共経営学）/ PhD in Public ManagementThis dissertation aims to present the background circumstances of Myanmar budget reform, the effect of political and institutional changes on budget punctuation patterns, and how these punctuation patterns affect public service performance. This dissertation is composed of three essays that are arranged in the following sequence. The first essay focuses on “process”, which examines “how” the budget reform was adopted; the second essay focuses on “output”, which explores “what” happened due to the budget reform that coincided with political and institutional changes; and the third essay focuses on “outcomes”, which investigates the “impacts” of the budget reform. The first essay discusses the issues and development of policy solutions in the budgetary system before the 2011 budget reform. This essay employs Kingdon’s multiple streams theory (MST) to explain how and when the problems, policy solutions, and politics surrounding the Myanmar budget reform came together to open the policy window. Furthermore, this essay highlights the significance of issue linkage and partial coupling in the policy process (Kingdon, 1995; Dolan, 2021). All MST studies agree that policy cannot change without coupling the three streams. Furthermore, only a few studies, including ours, have discovered that multiple partial couplings occur before the complete coupling of the three streams. Therefore, policymakers or policy entrepreneurs need to be aware of partial coupling. As soon as partial coupling occurs, policymakers or policy entrepreneurs should try to find any constraints that make it impossible for the remaining stream to couple with the other two streams. By doing so, they will be able to find the policy factors or political strategies that quickly lead to complete coupling. The second essay discusses how budget allocation patterns changed both before and after the budget reform. Since Myanmar’s budget reform coincided with political and institutional changes, this essay tries to explain the effect of political and institutional changes on budget punctuation patterns by employing budget incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). This study expects budget punctuation to have occurred in different directions and frequencies. Therefore, the significant theoretical contribution of this study is to extend Flink and Robinson’s (2020) corrective and trend models, which are rooted in the PET literature. The corrective and trend models are used to examine the directions of budget punctuation (positive or negative). By applying corrective and trend models, this study distinguishes nine budget punctuation patterns for Myanmar government spending on seven sectors from 2000 to 2019 (10 years before the budget reform and 9 years after the budget reform). The study reveals that political and institutional changes have had different effects on different sectors. Additionally, different budget punctuation patterns have been observed with different frequencies across sectors due to sector- specific characteristics and evolving policy priorities. The third essay assesses how the changes in allocation patterns after the budget reform have affected public service performance. This study differentiates public performance into the three competing dimensions of public service performance (3Es: efficiency, effectiveness, and equity). It is assumed that different magnitudes and directions of budget changes have different performance outcomes. To examine how budget allocation changes made after the reform have affected the 3Es, this study applies PET by incorporating other theories from the public administration literature. As the current study uses a two-level dataset—budget allocation data at the ministry level and performance data (3Es and other control variables) at the individual level—multilevel modeling, which provides the unique advantage of examining the associations between the variables measured at different hierarchical levels, is employed. To measure the changes in resource allocation, we define the four categories of budget changes (i.e., positive punctuation, negative punctuation, positive annual percentage changes, and negative annual percentage changes) by using the annual budget allocation of 18 ministries for the fourteen years (including both before and after the budget reform). Performance data are obtained by administering surveys to public officers from different ministries. Through multilevel analysis on a two-level dataset, the results of the current study reveal that budget increases have not uniformly improved all 3Es. The different magnitudes and directions of budget changes have had different effects on 3Es. Keywords: Multiple streams theory, partial and complete couplings, Myanmar budget reform, decentralization, budget deficit, transparency and accountability, budget allocation, corrective and trend models, incrementalism, punctuated equilibrium theory, political and institutional changes, public service performance, hierarchical linear modelthesi

Neo-classical Realism Approach to Economic Integration through Free Trade Agreements: A Study on South Asia (2000 – 2020)

International University of Japan博士（国際関係学）/ Ph.D. in International Relations2024World Trade Organisation (WTO) expects Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) to foster regional integration and for each region to become a building bloc to form a single multilateral trade system collectively. Many economic studies have reiterated South Asia has a comparative advantage in enhancing economic integration. Despite the potential, the region remains as one the least connected, with only 5.5% of intra-regional trade. The existing scholarship has already suggested that the reasons for this low level are political, although these factors still need to be adequately studied. This study attempts to fill this gap by exploring the systemic factors and processes affecting South Asia's low level of economic integration between 2000 - 2020. Employing the Neo-Classical Realism (NCR) Type III model presented by Ripsman et al. (2016), this study traces the causal relations between the systemic, sub-systemic and domestic variables in the FTA-making processes in three South Asian countries: India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The pressure from the US, China and the India – Pakistan rivalry are systemic and sub-systemic pressures. Four factors, leader images, strategic culture, state-society relations, and domestic institutions, are the domestic variables mediating systemic pressure. Adopting the Deductive Qualitative Analysis (DQA), the study uses two research methods: Comparative Case Studies (CCS) and Process Tracing (PT), which are the mainstay methods in NCR-inspired studies. The hoop test was used to trace the causality depicted in the data. The evidence is collected from primary and secondary sources and semi-structured interviews. The study suggests the necessary criteria to establish causation between all three systemic and sub-systemic pressures and the economic integration in South Asia, differently in three stages: 2000-2006/07; 2006/07-2010 and 2010-2020. The impact of the US pressure during the first stage has resulted in a proliferation of FTAs. In the second phase, the pressure from China has significantly impacted the region, forming a more restrictive environment for trade liberalisation through its bilateral engagements with Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Meanwhile, India has expanded its trade with East Asian countries. The same trend continued more intensely from 2010 – 2020, further weakening South Asian integration. The study found the NCR Type III model to be enormously useful in explaining the phenomenon of the low level of economic integration in South Asia.thesi