Southeast Asia has been buffeted by several shocks and momentous events over the last two years, in particular the economic recession which started in July 1997; the return of Hong Kong to China; and political instability, particularly in Indonesia.

Increasingly, large, extended urban regions compete with each other in the Region and in the global economy. Furthermore, as a result of strong driving forces, including free trade, convergence in tax structures, and the "death of distance", Southeast Asian urban regions are less protected and influenced by nation states, and are thus highly vulnerable to unpredictable consequences of strong forces associated with globalization and co-evolving domestic change.

Dr. Webster will assess events of the last few years in terms of the dramatic re-positioning that has occurred among major urban regions in Southeast Asia - identifying winners and losers. His assessment will be based on consideration of both competitiveness and resilience - the two primary objectives, perhaps non-reconcilable, of most Southeast Asian urban regions.

Dr. Webster is currently a visiting scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center. He has been Senior Urban Advisor to the National Planning Board, Prime Minister's Office, Thailand for the last five years. He is involved in formulation of strategies and policies related to urbanization in the context of rapid socio-economic change in Thailand. He is also full time advisor to the World Bank's Asia and Pacific Urban Unit. At the global level, he is involved in formulation of the World Bank's Global Urban Strategy, and the World Development Report 2000 which will focus on urbanization and decentralization.

Dr. Webster was formerly Director of the Urban Planning Program at the University of Calgary and Professor of Planning at the Asian Institute of Technology. He has advised a wide variety of governments, cities, corporations, and development agencies on urban policies and programming, particularly in Southeast Asia, over the last 25 years. He is the author of many academic and professional publications on urbanization and urban issues in Southeast Asia.

Entrepreneurs and self-employed people have much higher incomes than other rural Thai residents. This raises the question: why don't more people become entrepreneurs? One possibility is that people are prevented from changing their occupations because they lack wealth or access to credit. This talk provides a preliminary exploration of this issue using new survey data from rural Thailand. Anna Paulson is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She is currently a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and taught at Princeton before going to Kellogg. Her research is concerned with how people cope with risk, particularly in cases where formal financial and insurance markets are not available.

This presentation will focus on the effects of the economic crisis on poverty in Southeast Asia illustrated by a case study of Indonesia. Particular attention will be paid to the government responses with social safety net programs and how these responses have been influenced by government perceptions of the role of rural-urban dynamics and the urban informal sector. This presentation is based upon research carried out over the last sixteen months in Indonesia. The final part of the talk deals with the issue of inserting social policy into development plans in the period of economic recovery in Indonesia. Terry Mc Gee has spent more than 40 years carrying out research in Southeast Asia. He has held appointments at the University of Malaysia, University of Hong Kong and the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australia National University (Canberra), as well as UBC since l978. He is the author of The Southeast Asian City (l967), Essays on Third World Urbanization ( l971) and co-editor of The Extended Metropolis in Asia (l991) and Mega-Urban Regions in Southeast Asia (l995) he has acted as a consultant for UNDP and CIDA on urban policy in Asia.

Like a double-edged sword, the recent conflict in East Timor challenged Indonesia and the international community alike. For Indonesia, the crisis and its resolution offered a chance for military reform, yet threatened national unity. For international donors, the chance to defend human rights and implement self-determination carried a risk of provoking nationalist resentment against foreign intervention for democratic change.This talk will focus on the international community and its donor countries and agencies. How did they react to the conflict in East Timor? What were their strategies? How did their actions affect Indonesia -- not only its East Timor policies but also the course of its own democratic transition? Looking back on them now, do the crisis and its outcome lessons for the feasibility of foreign intervention to achieve domestic political reform? If so, what are they? If not, why not? And what do the answers to these questions imply for the democratic prospect in developing countries more generally?

This talk explores the broader puzzles of the East Asian economic crisis through a focus on the Thai textile-garment industry. Once the leading Thai export, the textile industry weakened in the 1990's in the face of wage increases, regional competition and slackening demand. The goal of this talk is to explain the industry's past success, its failure to sustain that growth through technical upgrading, and its current responses to the crisis. The emphasis is on the political and institutional factors influencing industry performance. Rick Doner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, his M.A. in Chinese Studies from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Doner's general research interest is comparative political economy of Southeast Asia. This current research covers political and institutional bases of Thai economic growth, comparative analysis of business associations in developing countries, flexible production in East Asia, and political economy of the hard disk drive industry in East Asia.

Since gaining its independence in 1965, the Republic of Singapore has attracted a level of scholarly and journalistic interest disproportionate to its tiny size. Singapore has defied categorization. Time and again it has seemed to swim against the tide of intellectual and ideological fashion. It practiced a market economy and free trade before these became the rage. It maintained one-party dominance long after pluralistic democracy became the global norm that it is today. Singapore's "uniquely anomalous status as the world's richest nondemocracy" (Larry Diamond) makes it a puzzling exception to the rule that economically advanced countries practice political pluralism. Most recently, financial and political turbulence elsewhere in East Asia have highlighted the extraordinary stability of the Singapore system. Has the ruling People's Action Party found the answer to successful governance in a global economy? Are the city-state's leaders forcibly postponing the inevitableÑperhaps even imminentÑonset of political liberalization? Or is there another way of resolving the "Singapore puzzle"? Chee Soon Juan joined the opposition Singapore Democratic Party in 1992. Three months later he was dismissed from his position as a lecturer at the National University of Singapore. His writings include To Be Free: Stories from Asia's Struggle against Oppression (1998) and Dare to Change: An Alternative Vision for Singapore (1994). Cherian George is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. From 1990 to 1999 he worked as a journalist for Singapore's leading English-language newspaper, The Straits Times. He is a founding member of The Roundtable, a nonpartisan discussion group in Singapore.

In 1975Ð76 the fall of Saigon was followed by national reunification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic. Access to the Mekong Delta was widely expected to facilitate rapid neo-Stalinist industrialization and the appearance of a powerful military threat to capitalist SEA. But this did not happen. By 1981 partial reforms had permitted all state enterprises to operate in markets and some degree of agricultural decollectivisation. In the second half of the 1980s there was a clear de-Stalinization of everyday life. And by 1989Ð90 a recognizable market economy had emerged. Since then the Vietnamese Communist Party has, with some success, negotiated a major opening-up of the country to foreign contacts. Vietnam has joined ASEAN, and has seen the emergence of land, labor, and capital markets, and the confused processes by which classes form. Fundamental economic and political change has therefore occurred. Growth has been rather fast and the use of state violence minimal. Politically, for the still-Leninist VCP, the shift from Plan to Market has been a great success. What is the political economy basis for this? Despite emergent capitalist classes and a market economy, the political economy of "post-transition" Vietnam is heavily marked by its recent history, and remains very different from other ASEAN members. Notwithstanding revolutionary change, dualities common to both the traditional and modern political economies have offered great potential for political restructuring. In this sense "development doctrines" are perhaps less exotic and more indigenous than elsewhere in SEA. This facilitates relatively harmonious political adaptation and is the key to understanding change. For example, wide rural land access, with a collective tinge in the most densely populated areas, has a strong and pervasive effect upon the macro political economy. "Voice and exit" are enhanced. Thus we see rather high levels of migration, and risk bearing be farmers. Rural GDP has grown fast through the 1990s. Also, real wages in urban areas tend to be higher and the labor regime less brittle. What are the political implications of such a land regime? At the end of the day, one reason for the lack of extensive state violence against the population seems to be that the party/state has sufficient sources of support and power for tense economic issues in the rural areas to be fought out without property rights needing violence to enforce them. These issues are fought out locally (within cooperatives and communes) and in macro contexts (access to world markets). But in the rural areas the state does not, apparently, need to support particular economic interests for its survival. One reason for this is that the "land issue" has been addressed through the adaptation of socialist models, so that large-scale land property is not (yet?) a major issue. Dominant groups in the rural areas do not depend upon land access for their incomes. Adam Fforde is a development economist. He holds an Oxford MA (Engineering Science and Economics), a London MSc (Economics) and a Cambridge PhD (Economics). He studied Vietnamese in Hanoi during 1978/79 and was a visiting scholar at the National Economics University (Hanoi) in 1985Ð86. He lived in Vietnam from 1987 to 1992 while working as an advisor to the Swedish aid program, and in Australia from 1992 to 1999, where he was a visiting fellow at the ANU and Chairman of Aduki Pty Ltd (Consultants). He is now senior fellow at the SEA Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He has published on topics including the economic development of north Vietnam prior to 1975, agricultural cooperatives, and the transition from plan to market. He is currently working on class formation and the emergence of factor markets in the 1990s, industrial reform since the early 1960s, and Vietnamese development doctrine.

An eminent historian of China and Overseas Chinese, Wang Gungwu has served as President of the University of Hong Kong, Professor and Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, and Dean of Arts at the University of Malaya in Singapore. He is currently Director of the East Asian Institute at National University of Singapore and Distinguished Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. His many books include The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea (1958, new edition 1998); Community and Nation (1981, new edition 1993); China and Southeast Asia: Myths, Threats, and Culture (1999); The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (2000).