The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy has a diverse range of research projects

The Women’s Pathways to Leadership in Asia (WPLA) project aims to promote a fuller realization of Asian women’s potential in contributing to the betterment of Asian lives through greater vertical mobility in the public and private sectors, and in civil society. It seeks to uncover and understand obstacles such as societal biases and discriminatory policies and practices affecting women’s upward mobility in these work domains in Asia, and find ways to overcome them.

Initial broad-spectrum research was undertaken, leading to the publication of “Rising to the Top: A Report on Women’s Leadership in Asia”, a new study that highlights the current socio-economic landscape for women in Asia-Pacific countries. The report discusses gender gap issues and presents policy recommendations for governments and corporations to ease gender inequality from birth to leadership. It was launched in Shanghai in April 2012 at the third Asia Society Women Leaders of New Asia (WLNA) summit. Further dissemination of the report, outreach activities to government officials and agencies in Southeast Asia and supporting student-led activities on women’s leadership and public policy is planned for this period. The Project will also host and facilitate more discussions and research on the different pathways to leadership for women in Asia.

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Click here to visit the WPLA website

The Asian Society for Institutional Analysis aims to promote research on the institutions in Asia and will carry out this mission by organizing various workshops and conferences, recognizing outstanding work of young institutional scholars in Asia and building an international network of scholars with interest in institutional analysis in Asia.

Dr. Eduardo Araral, an Assistant Dean of LKY School, will serve as the founding President of ASIASIA.

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The Asian Trends Monitoring Bulletin is a project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York, the Centre for Strategic Futures, Singapore, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

The Asian Trends Monitoring Bulletin focuses on the analysis of pro-poor projects and innovative approaches that will contribute to alleviate poverty. The emphasis is put on identifying major trends for the poor in rural and urban areas, highlighting sustainable and scalable concepts, and analysing how these could impact the future of Asia’s well-being and future development.

The Asian Trends Monitoring Bulletin are designed to encourage dialogue and debate about critical issues that affect Asia’s ability to reduce poverty and increase awareness of the implications for pro-poor policy and policy development.

Click here for the programme website.

The logic underpinning this project is one that is first and foremost tasked towards mitigating risk for mobilising capital in the interests of facilitating private sector expansion. Yet early investigations of the market-building project suggest that risk is not evenly distributed by many of the activities that are now staples within development. In this regard, the negative outcomes associated with institution building/project implementation are regularly attributed by policy makers to an inability to build the ‘right institutions’ and the role of ‘vested interests’ and regulatory capture in such situations. For example, while the IFC and the IMF can insist that the receipt of funds for development of an oil field requires that a country establish an oil fund to ensure prudent use of revenues, in practice the desired function of such a fund may never eventuate due to particular political forces. This said, that the conditions are met up front (i.e. the fund is formally established and put into motion) means that a mega-project can proceed with public financing. And even if, as the IFC often insists with its projects, monitoring NGOs are contracted in the interests of keeping a state and private sector operators accountable, too often the results are less than impressive – with pernicious elites able to capture benefits to the exclusion of populations and private entities shirking responsibilities. This suggests that markets aren’t actually ‘built’ – in the lingo commonly deployed by the World Bank in relation to institutions – they are contested. This implies significant work for academics and policy makers alike.

This project was initiated by the Centre on Asia and Globalisation (CAG) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, which serves as a bridge between Asia and the world on issues of global significance. The centre focuses on four major areas of research: major-power relations in Asia-Pacific and their global implications; regional regimes and institutions in Asia-Pacific and their role in global governance; common-goods issues: environment, energy, food, water and pandemics; and market development in Asia..

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Between 2008 and 2010, the project brought together scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America to investigate how basic questions about sovereignty and institutional diversity in world affairs are being addressed in two key issue areas: Global Health Governance (GHG) and Global Energy Governance (GEG).

Click here for reports from the programme.

The Project on Risk and Regulation is developing a new assessment mechanism to evaluate the political and regulatory risk environment of Asia’s economies. The project has two interrelated goals: to better understand the institutional and regulatory characteristics, and operating parameters of regulatory regimes and their associated political institutions in some of Asia’s leading industry areas; and to assess the relationship between regulatory regimes and the incidence of risk as it impacts specific industry sectors and individual business enterprises. Consequently, the Project seeks to surmount the problems associated with conventional macro sovereign risk assessment methodologies by developing a novel risk-analysis system situated at the industry sector level that enables a more accurate mapping of institutional risk incidences for foreign direct investment.

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