Globalization, Development, and Mobility of Technical Talent: India and Japan in Comparative Perspectives

international migration, technical talent, IT industry, innovation and development, 'brain bank', India, Japan

The International Mobility of Technical Talent: Trends and Development Implications

international migration, education, government policy, human capital, skills, information services, computer

Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland

This paper argues that the 'nostalgia' that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely. In his book Long-distance Nationalism Zlatko Skrbis defines nostalgia as 'a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means 'to return home' and algia, 'a painful condition' (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past - a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is 'perhaps the most dangerous ... of all the ways of using history' because it glosses 'over the past's iniquities and indignities'. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also 'fix' the past and recover it in 'narrative terms' (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home

Food from peace: breaking the links between conflict and hunger

"In this paper, Ellen Messer, Marc J. Cohen, and Jashinta D'Costa show how hunger is often a direct result of violence ... [and] how hunger can reciprocally cause conflict. ... The authors call for including conflict prevention in food security and development efforts, as well as new linkages between food security and development on the one hand, and emergency relief on the other" Foreword.Social conflict., Hunger., Conflict management.,

Globalization, development, and mobility of technical talent: India and Japan in comparative perspectives

The objective here is to understand how the mobility of technical talent might be changing the structural relationship between rich and poor countries. This paper examines the under-researched relationship between India and Japan in the context of globalization, migration, and developmental impact with demographic, immigration, and innovation policy issues as key themes. By focusing on the export of technical talent, I argue that India could tap its overseas ‘brain bank’ by diversifying IT export markets, create epistemic networks, meet impending skill shortages in Japan, and induce long-term innovative capability. Immigration reforms and freer movement of talent will be critical

The international mobility of technical talent: Trends and development implications

This paper charts the complex dynamics of the movement of technical talent in the world economy and assesses broadly the impact of such mobility on both sending and receiving countries. Based on secondary data and primary information from the Indian and Japanese IT industry, the study presents a global view of the movement of talent and its development and policy implications. By synthesizing disparate data and the multifaceted processes and outcomes of international mobility, the paper examines some of the distributional issues of gains and losses in both sending and receiving countries

A Pseudo-Panel Approach to Estimating Dynamic Effects of Road Infrastructure on Firm Performance in a Developing Country Context

To overcome the absence of true firm-level data, we provide evidence that the use of pseudo-panels based on aggregated data can correctly identify production function parameters. We construct a pseudo-panel of Colombian manufacturing firms for the years of 2000 to 2009 to study the effects of transportation infrastructure on firm performance in a developing country and find elasticities of output with respect to road infrastructure ranging from 0.13 to 0.15 per cent. This confirms that roads are important for private output growth and, as our results are larger than those reported in the literature for developed countries, that transportation infrastructure is relatively more important for the economy of developing countries. We also identify a one-year time lag with which firms’ outputs react to road stock changes. This could be indicative of firms requiring time to adjust their production to road changes. We furthermore identify that the effect of road infrastructure is particularly large for heavy manufacturing industries. Moreover, we investigate the regional heterogeneity of the role of transportation infrastructure for firms’ output growth. Our results are robust to different econometric concerns. We additionally provide Monte Carlo simulations to support the validity of pseudo-panels in the context of firm-level data

The urban wage growth premium: evidence from British cities.

The urban economics literature provides ample evidence of an urban wage premium: wages are higher in larger urban areas. This paper addresses three central issues of the urban wage premium about which the field has not yet reached a consensus. First, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas explains the urban wage premium. Second, which of the major agglomeration economies might generate this premium. Third, whether workers receive this wage premium immediately, or through faster wage growth over time. In order to consider these issues we use worker-level data from a large panel of British workers for the period 1998 to 2009. We first document the existence of an urban wage premium and more specifically a city size premium for Britain which persists when we control for both observed and unobserved time-invariant characteristics of workers. We also provide evidence of a city size premium on wage growth, but show that this is driven purely by the increase in wage that occurs in the first year that a worker moves to a larger location. When we exclude move years, we find no evidence of an urban wage growth premium. If as Glaeser and Maré (2001) argue, an urban wage growth premium is evidence of faster learning in cities then either this mechanism is not at work for Britain or faster learning is not reflected in wage growth. Wheeler (2006) suggests that the role of learning and matching in the urban wage growth premium might be particularly important for younger workers. Again, in the British context, we find little evidence to support this. We next examine whether living in an urban area affects the extent to which wage growth occurs on the job or as a result of changing jobs. Once we control for unobservable characteristics of workers we find no evidence that working in a larger urban area has any effect on either of these two components of wage growth. This result is also in contrast with the conclusions made in the US literature in favour of the role of learning and matching in cities. City living does have some impact on wage growth, however. Specifically, we show that workers who have at some point lived in a city experience faster wage growth than those who have never lived in a city

Becoming Entangled: Queer Attachments with Hemiparasites

What is that queer plant that drapes itself chaotically over the top of trees and bushes? You know the one along the road on the way into town? Ah yes! You mean the one with no leaves, that looks like tangled yarn caught up in the branches?  Yes, it looks like its floating airborne on top of the canopy, smothering and embracing at the same time. Well, that's the one with the common name of snotty gobble or Dodder-Laurel!!! Dodder may look chaotic but that only demands on how you view it. I can’t stop thinking about it, Let’s find out what it’s doing. ‘Learning to be affected’ says Bruno Latour is to be 'moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans’(2004). And this is what happened to Down the Road Projects when we became intrigued with local plant parasites where we live in central Victoria, Australia.  This paper explores how we became ensnared by planty agencies. By charting our multispecies and human interactions in the course of developing the art project, Becoming Differently (2018), we trace how parasites came to be an important theme of the art, how they infiltrated the art works, how they changed our understanding of parasites, how they enticed us into the bush and developed our style of collaboration. We ‘queery’ what it means to be ‘drawn towards’ particular plants, we wonder who or what is ‘drawing’, and how these particular plants inflected our art and writing. We consider how we were moved towards different ways of figuring identity and belonging, and how we grappled with practices and modes of engagement with complex issues of identity, belonging and nature in a settler-colonial situation, and how this led to us to become differently entangled in the place where we live

Cascades Across An ‘Extremely Violent Society’: Sri Lanka

In the “Peacebuilding Compared” research project so far, violence is seen as cascading across space and time within and between war-torn societies. This article illustrates the cascade lens as a framework for hypothesis generation. Both violent actions and violent imaginaries cascade. The recent history of Sri Lanka is used to illustrate three cascade dynamics: crime cascades to war, war cascades to more war and to crime, and crime and war both cascade to state violence such as torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial execution. Sri Lanka is also a case that cascaded new technologies of crime-war globally, such as suicide bombing vests. These are not the only important cascade dynamics, just neglected ones. The implications of our cascade analysis are not most importantly about building positive peace with justice, participation, truth and reconciliation at the end of tragic cascades. They are more importantly about securing negative peace preventively at the font of cascades.