Apparel export quotas that defined the worldwide garment trade for four decades ended on 1 January 2005. Trade data since then suggest that production has shifted from Southeast Asia to China. For the most developed countries in Southeast Asia, the loss of the garment industry will be a tolerable inconvenience. But it will devastate countries whose economies depend on such exports. An extreme example is Cambodia, three-fourths of whose exports are apparel. Are the threads from which these poor economies hang about to break? Is this industrys migration out of Southeast Asia inevitable and irrevocable? What, if anything, can governments and companies in the region do?

Geoffrey Stafford earned his PhD in political science (1998) and an MA in Southeast Asian studies (1996) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing his dissertation, Globalization Amid Diversity: Economic Development Policy in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia 1987-1997, he joined a large retailer to work on issues of corporate social responsibility in the global garment-manufacturing arena. In that capacity he is now analyzing the effects of quota termination on the world apparel industry. He has taught the politics of Southeast Asia at the University of San Francisco.

Thailand has gone through an extraordinary six months. In October in the south, a protest by Muslims in Tak Bai triggered a deadly overreaction by security forces. Eighty-five people died by suffocation or crushing from being detained in army trucks. Many more were killed in December when a tsunami struck the country's west coast, devastating the local tourist industry. The poultry industry had already been badly hurt by avian flu. One might have thought that the government's popularity would have suffered from these events. Instead, in national parliamentary elections in February, the ruling Thai Rak Thai party of incumbent Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra won an unprecedented absolute majority of 377 out of 500 seats. No Thai prime minister had ever been reelected for a second consecutive term, and no Thai party had ever carried a democratic election by such a huge margin. Why? And with what implications for the future?

Kavi Chongkittavorn is assistant group editor of National Multimedia Group, publisher of the English language daily, The Nation. Before taking up this position, he was The Nation's bureau chief in Cambodia (1987-1989) and Vietnam (1989-1991). For more than two decades he has reported the news from Thailand and Southeast Asia. He served briefly as a special assistant to the secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (1994-1995). He also chairs the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, a Bangkok-based media freedom advocacy group.

The workshop, co-hosted by PESD and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, examines the success of the Chinese rural electrification program.