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This chapter highlights the characteristics of Asia through the analysis of policy-related documents by five donor countries, namely Japan, South Korea, China, India and Thailand. It will also examine the roles played by regional bodies such as the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) and ASPBAE (the Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education) as the horizontal channels influencing aid policies in respective countries. Together with the analysis of the national and organizational policies, the regional process of building consensus on the post-2015 agenda is examined, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific Regional Education Conference (APREC) held in August 2014.

The analysis reveals that the region has two faces: one is imaginary and the other is functional. There is a common trend across Asian donors to refer to their historical ties with regions and countries to which they provide assistance and their traditional notions of education and development. They highlight Asian features in contrast to conventional aid principles and approaches based on the Western value system, either apparently or in a muted manner. In this sense, the imagined community of Asia with common cultural roots is perceived by the policymakers across the board.

At the same time, administratively, the importance of the region as a stage between the national and global levels is recognized increasingly in the multilateral global governance structure. With this broadened participatory structure, as discussed in the chapter ‘Post-EFA Global Discourse: The Process of Shaping the Shared View of the ‘Education Community’’, the expected function of the region to transmit the norms and requests from the global level and to collect and summarize national voices has increased.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the progress and challenges of South Asia in trade liberalization and facilitation, and to quantitatively demonstrate the potential benefits of trade facilitation in South Asia.

The quantitative study simulates the trade gains to the region based on the gravity model estimation for 101 world countries.

The gains to the region are estimated to be $31 billion in 2007 and $26 billion in 2010 if South Asia and the “rest of the world” raised levels of trade facilitation halfway to the world average. Of those trade gains, about 80 per cent (in 2007) and 67 per cent (in 2010) of the total gains to South Asia will be generated from South Asia's own efforts.

Thus this study demonstrates the importance of trade facilitation as an instrument for expansion of trade both within South Asia and with the rest of the world, as well as policy recommendations regarding the priority area for reform.

This chapter analyzes the impact of terrorism in South Asian countries. The study is based on secondary data collected from South Asian Report, crime records, South Asia Terrorism Portal, and other reports. Descriptive statistics of South Asia shows that out of the total deaths due to terrorism, 52.63 percent of the deaths occurred among terrorists, 35.22 percent civilians, and only 12.15 percent among the security forces (SFs). Human Development Index (HDI) and total number of fatalities in the region are highly correlated with an expected negative sign. This means that terrorist activities have adversely affected human development in the South Asian region. Besides, human development of the SFs has been highly hampered by their fatalities, with that of terrorists being relatively low. Civilians are relatively less affected by the fatalities as the correlation results show a moderate (−0.543) value. Total number of deaths due to terrorism in India was 21,942 between 2005 and 2018 but was 57,840 in Pakistan, which is substantially higher compared to India. The number of deaths of civilians, SFs, and terrorists in Pakistan is almost double that of India during the same period. In India, civilian deaths due to terrorism have significantly reduced over time. In Pakistan, civilian deaths have increased from 2005 to 2013, thereafter reducing. Terrorist groups have been subjected to major loss due to more deaths among them. With regard to terrorism, Pakistan is the most critical country in the South Asian region. Regional cooperation in South Asia and multilateral discussions can reduce terrorism in this region.

South Asia is a region urgently seeking development, although it has failed in regional integration. It is the second least integrated region regarding the number of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and can thus be recognised as a missing bloc in the global multilateral system. This study aims to focus on South Asian FTAs and explores the problems of the inter-relations and compatibility between the systemic and regional trade systems.

The study proposes a framework to benchmark the compatibility of South Asian FTAs with WTO rules. Primary data from 2000 to 2020, including descriptive analyses of reports, legal text of the FTAs, official documents and factual presentations, have been collected and analysed through thematic analysis using the proposed framework.

The study finds that, although South Asian FTAs meet most of the WTO requirements, they are not progressing toward facilitating and promoting trade. Data from 2000 to 2020 show us that South Asian FTAs have not significantly impacted trade between themselves. The study argues that, although South Asian FTAs fulfil some benchmarks, they show only a lukewarm interest in contributing to the international trading system as building blocs. It is therefore recommended that the case of South Asian trade liberalisation must be understood contextually and be given careful and exclusive attention by the WTO.

As such, this study is the first to claim that South Asian FTAs are not fully compatible with the WTO rules. They remain a missing regional bloc in the multilateral system, rather than a building bloc or a stumbling bloc, delaying the region’s opportunity to develop as a region and within the larger system.

The paper presents the facts on the policy challenges and opportunities in the way forward of trade and economic co-operation in South Asia amid the coronavirus disease 2019, which comes to be the least economically integrated region worldwide. Due to tense geopolitics in South Asia, trade is heavily biased toward extra-regional markets despite of existing regional trade agreements (TAs) in the region.

Having tested the stationarity of data with structural break, the paper uses intra-regional trade in addition to other domestic economic variables as exogenous regressors in autoregressive distributed lag multivariate framework, hence raising the quality of statistical inference.

This paper highlights that intra-regional trade significantly affects the economic welfare as measured by Gross Domestic Product per capita of the people from the region, hence raising the need for higher regional trade openness. If trade barriers are overcome, all the South Asian countries will gain through effective implementation of regional TAs.

The study relies on the multivariate technique with regional trade share as the main exogenous variable. In addition, the regulatory and economic conditions of all countries are different which also tends to affect the mutual degree of trade relations.

Over the economic reasons, the manmade barriers owing to political differences are the root cause for the low intra-regional trade. Amid the pandemic, South Asian courtiers have the high time to leverage the bilateral trade for mutual benefits. India being the largest economy can play a decisive role in pushing forward the regional trade bloc – South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) – for achieving its objective through multilateral engagements in a wider perspective.

The present study makes pioneer efforts to examine the dynamic linkages between regional trade and economic growth. The results provide new insight into the dynamics of benefits driven by trade interdependency.

Proposes that most managers and researchers acknowledge that emerging and newly industrialized markets do not have the same quantity of secondary data as the long‐industrialized economies of North America and Western Europe. Presents the results of a search of available, business‐related, secondary data on South‐East Asia’s rapidly growing economies; highlights how this dearth of data has resulted in an informational void that affects the practice of strategic management in the region. Also delineates how regional managers cope with and adapt to the informational void, and to the region’s fast‐changing business, cultural and competitive environments, by developing their unique, highly‐intuitive style of strategic management. Finally, provides some suggestions to bridge this informational void for management practice and for future research.

Purpose – This empirical article aims at studying whether, how, and to what extent the South Asian countries have or are planning to move in the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) direction.

Design/methodology/approach – By applying the institutional perspectives, the article seeks to explore the roles and contributions of international financial institutions in the dissemination of public sector accounting reform ideas, particularly IPSASs ideas in South Asia. Document search represents the major method of collecting data for this study.

Findings – The present article demonstrates that the majority of the South Asian countries have envisaged the adoption of the cash basis IPSAS as a way forward in order to implement accrual accounting. International financial institutions have seemingly created a myth in the region that accrual accounting cannot be introduced without first complying with the cash basis IPSAS. However, the countries’ efforts are to a large extent directed at adapting rather than adopting IPSASs in all material respects. In relation to this, the article suggests that the acceptance of IPSASs in South Asia is better understood in terms of legitimacy.

Research limitations/implications – It is beyond the scope of this article to cover the ongoing public sector accounting reforms in South Asia other than IPSASs reforms as well as to reveal accounting changes at other levels than central government level.

Practical implications – The article raises doubts as to whether and to what extent the cash basis IPSAS will help public sector management reforms in South Asia.

Originality/value – Given the paucity of consistent research efforts on the topic in Western English language literature, the present article strives to bring ongoing IPSASs reforms in South Asia into the international arena. The article also contributes to the growing body of the comparative public sector accounting research by presenting the similarities and differences in government accounting reforms, particularly IPSASs reforms, in South Asia.

This paper aims to elaborate in a greater detail about how to manage and eventually help resolve outstanding issues, including the core issue of Kashmir between nuclear India and Pakistan. In doing so, this paper elaborates various innovative measures that could be applicable to South Asian nuclear environment that in turn could assist the South Asian nuclear leadership in understanding and managing the fragility of South Asian nuclear deterrence.

Innovatively, this research paper looks at the South Asian nuclear issues at three levels of analysis – understanding the prevailing dynamics of nuclear revolution and improved means of communications and promoting deterrence stability in South Asia. All three levels may be more needed than ever before in the wake of the arrival of nuclear weapons for a broader Southern Asian region.

This paper finds out that although nuclear weapons have become a reality in South Asia and these deadly weapons have prevented major wars between India and Pakistan, nuclear weapons have not prevented the crises between India and Pakistan. Therefore, both India and Pakistan have confronted a number of crises. The paper finds out that any serious crisis between India and Pakistan could further undermine the credibility of existing confidence-building measures and the same could escalate from military to nuclear level. Absent from immediate measures undertaken by the South Asian security leadership, nuclear weapons may not help prevent the war between India and Pakistan at the sub-conventional level, this paper finds out.

By explaining innovative measures at the three level of analysis, this papers adds to the existing literature in understanding the behavior of South Asian security leadership and how these measures could best bring positive results in preventing a major crisis that potentially bears the risk of escalation to nuclear level.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore the interrelationships between FDI with growth and sustainability dimension; and to empirically analyze the four dimensions, namely, environmental, economic, social and governance of sustainable FDI for South Asia and West Asia.

The data utilized in the paper is sourced from the World Development Indicators and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, covering South and West Asian region over the period 2011–2017. The paper employed both static and dynamic panel (two-step difference generalized methods of moments) estimation methods.

The results established a significant and robust relationship of past year FDI inflows with the current year’s value of FDI inflows for both the regions. Further, some variances in the relationships such as control of corruption, long-run carbon emissions, research and development, number of trademark applications as per the contextual factors have been detected.

The conclusions related to gender and governance found in this paper will be of interest to both researchers and policy makers for substantially reorienting the sustainability attributes to the foreign investment.

The authors’ main contributions are: to encapsulate the conceptual framework into an empirical model by combining all the four dimensions, namely, environmental, economic, social and governance; to have analyzed the possible differences and similarities in the study based on South and West Asia; to have explored the relationship between gender and FDI.

This chapter looks at the way the forces of globalization and, contextual factors together have shaped the trajectory and outcomes of education in the South Asian region which comprises India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. External influence on the education of this region is not at all a recent phenomenon. The arrival of rulers from Central Asia, the spread of Christianity and Islam through trade connections during the first millennium and finally, the British Colonialism influenced the nature of education in the region historically. The social context, for example, the caste system or discriminatory gender norms also determined the access to education and the ways through which it developed over time.