Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Economic assistance, Australian Thailand'

This research is in response to the current debate on aid in Australia. The debate focuses on the volume of money allocated to aid rather than the impact. While Australian aid is still far from the UN commitment of 0.7 per cent of gross national income, this focus has kept public debate superficial and has deflected attention away from the more important discussion: is aid achieving outcomes and impacting positively in areas identified by developing countries as essential for their sustainable development.
The release of the first Annual Review of Development Effectiveness provided the impetus to investigate whether the newly formed Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) will introduce changes that will improve Australia’s approach to aid. Framed within national interest, development and aid literature, this research analyses what limitations, if any, there are to reform of aid policies and practices in Australia.
The thesis concludes that the potential for the ODE to significantly improve the effectiveness of Australia aid is limited. It is one of many voices – including the powerful national interest agenda furthered by foreign policymakers – shaping Australian aid policy and practice. However, the furthering of Australian national interest – narrowly defined as security and economic considerations – through the aid program is at the expense of poverty alleviation objectives. This negatively affects how the development ‘problem’ is framed and thus the focus of aid policy. Furthermore, efforts to prioritise national interest considerations undermine the adoption of ‘good’ practice essential for sustainable development.
This is a political reality that is unlikely to change. Thus, the role of the ODE is to provide recommendations within this restricted framework. However, it is only through scrutiny, discussion and debate that the discrepancy between ‘good development’ in theory and in practice can be narrowed. This should also be the role of the ODE.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northwestern University, 1987.
Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 408-429).

It is widely acknowledged that the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and that they have limited resources and capacity to deal with the problems of adaptation without assistance from the international community. While PICs might logically take a regional approach in requesting international assistance to implement adaptation measures, climate change affects a wide range of activities. This study examined Pacific Island responses to donors' assistance, with particular focus on Australian and Japanese assistance and explored cross-sectoral issues associated with planning and implementation of adaptation measures by PICs. Australia asserts that a scientific knowledge base and capacity to use timely locally tailored scientific data is a fundamental requirement for guide policy makers and planners to provide cost-effective resource management and the implementation of locally appropriate adaptation measures. Australia has provided assistance on that basis through its overseas aid program from the early 1990s. However, given the diversity of local concerns, the different stakeholders have different perceptions of the threat and risks of climate change and preferred response measures. Under these conditions, robust scientific knowledge alone does not necessarily translate into sensible decision-making processes, in the absence of further assistance to assist PIC in enhancing their institutional capacity and to implement climate change projects. Japanese assistance, which specifically targets climate change in PICs, was found to be limited to the promotion of climate change research and human resource development. More broadly, Japanese ODA has prioritized PICs' environmental problems and the improvement of their livelihood over time, because the primary objective of Japanese assistance is to support PICs' taking ownership of their own development through capacity development with its grant aid and technical cooperation. Interviewees' opinions, particularly those of government officials, regarding Japan's assistance indicated that PICs adaptation needs were generally consistent with their needs for livelihood improvement and economic growth. Responses also revealed that it was of fundamental importance to PICs that donors' recognize and understand the diverse condition in each country and develop individually tailored responses through comprehensive program-based assistance. The delivery of Japanese ODA on a bilateral basis was thus welcomed by many PICs. It is clear that PICs are unable to implement the necessary adaptation responses without significant financial and technical assistance from donors. Interviewees responses tended to highlight their personal or agencies' preferred process for obtaining and delivering aid. Both Australian and Japanese assistance to date have provided little impetus for institutional change to promote a long-term commitment to the implementation of adaptation measures by PICs. In addition, the different funding mechanisms have caused institutional fragmentation between agencies in PICs, resulting in limited information sharing and lack of policy coordination across agencies. Donor expectations and PICs' adaptation needs are unlikely to be met until PICs' institutional challenges, including the ability to effectively utilize existing funds, are addressed.

The exporting of education has become an integral part of the Australian economy and is now Australia's third largest export industry valued at over A$3.2 billion. The impact that these large flows of students into the Australian economy (for significant periods at a time) is having on Australia's bilateral trade relationships with these source countries, is now a pertinent issue. As the literature on immigration flows has identified, social network theory is an important tool in explaining how cross border flows of people can stimulate international trade activity. What impact are overseas students' social networks playing in stimulating trade activity between Australia and their home countries? This research on the economic impact of Thai overseas students on Australia/Thailand bilateral trade flows is a timely study undertaken to answer such questions.

The Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development of South and Southeast Asia developed out of a meeting of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers in Ceylon, January 1950. To date, few scholars have examined the Colombo Plan in any significant detail and most assessments focus on the development of educational links between Australia and Asia, largely because of the significant numbers of scholars who came to Australia under the scheme. This thesis explores the Colombo Plan from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the economic, political, social and strategic context surrounding the emergence and implementation of the program between 1950 and 1965. This thesis argues that the Colombo Plan had a much broader political and cultural agenda, and cannot be understood from a humanitarian perspective alone. The Colombo Plan was an attempt to counter communist expansion in the newly independent nations of Southeast Asia by raising living standards and thus removing the conditions considered likely to create popular sympathy for communist forces. More significantly, the Colombo Plan, with its modernist assumptions about the importance of development, technology and social progress, was to be a vehicle for the transmission of Western values. By exploring the cultural, ideological and political underpinnings of the Colombo Plan, this thesis illustrates that the plan was an important part of Australian foreign policy, and was motivated by international security priorities and the need to allay domestic cultural concerns. One of the important ways Australia expressed and promoted its political and economic interests in the Asian region was through the Colombo Plan. This scheme functioned as a humanitarian program intended to improve the living conditions in Asian countries, however, it also operated as ‘unspoken propaganda’ designed to improve trade relations, establish diplomatic and cultural contacts, and help deflect criticism of the White Australia Policy. This examination of the Colombo Plan reveals the changing nature of Australia’s regional identity and the nature of its engagement with Asia during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Bibliography: leaves 373-418.
xiv, 418 leaves : maps ; 30 cm.
Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics, 1996?

This thesis addresses the puzzle of how a development policy model of partnership works by examining the case of the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program (CPP), involving seven Papua New Guinea churches, their partner Australian faithbased NGOs, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the National Government. By focusing on the effects on churches of engaging in a donor-funded program, the research adds to a particular strand in the anthropology of development literature concerned with how development interventions work, and to another in development studies concerned with the relationship between religion and development. This thesis uses a Foucauldian governmentality perspective to understand development and foreign aid as regimes of practice, shaped by a secular tradition that uses a language in which the policy model of partnership has become both normative and instrumental. It also understands Christianity as a regime of practice, shaped by a religious tradition that uses a particular language for talking about development. Employing the extended metaphor of the kundu or hour-glass drum, the thesis analyses processes of translation of the Christian and secular 'rhythms', or languages of development, being played by the partners. Key interlocutors carry out the work of translation in order to make their languages mutually intelligible. In so doing, they find themselves enacting a kundu relationship, which affirms their personal agency as partnership trustees. As partners with diverse interests are brought together to achieve CPP outcomes and their own organisational goals, being in a kundu relationship creates local translation spaces where the dynamic interaction of Christian and secular regimes of practice occur. These spaces present opportunities for manoeuvre on the part of the churches, and for the exercise of a productive form of power that simultaneously disciplines and empowers them in unanticipated ways. In this way, the thesis discerns continuities in the dialectical encounters between the global and the local in Papua New Guinea's missionary and colonial histories and the present-day development landscape. The conclusion is that Papua New Guinea churches are assuming organisational identities as agents of a form of development that is underpinned theologically and translated into the vernacular. The churches are framing their engagement with development as a means of fulfilling what John's Gospel calls 'life in all its fullness'.