Aims The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) has grown rapidly, but little is known about the drivers of inpatient spending in low- and middle-income countries. This study aims to compare the clinical presentation and expenditure on hospital admission for inpatients with a primary diagnosis of Type 2 DM in India, China, Thailand and Malaysia.

Methods We analysed data on adult, Type 2 DM patients admitted between 2005 and 2008 to five tertiary hospitals in the four countries, reporting expenditures relative to income per capita in 2007.

Results Hospital admission spending for diabetic inpatients with no complications ranged from 11 to 75% of per-capita income. Spending for patients with complications ranged from 6% to over 300% more than spending for patients without complications treated at the same hospital. Glycated haemoglobin was significantly higher for the uninsured patients, compared with insured patients, in India (8.6 vs. 8.1%), Hangzhou, China (9.0 vs. 8.1%), and Shandong, China (10.9 vs. 9.9%). When the hospital admission expenditures of the insured and uninsured patients were statistically different in India and China, the uninsured always spent less than the insured patients.

Conclusions With the rising prevalence of DM, households and health systems in these countries will face greater economic burdens. The returns to investment in preventing diabetic complications appear substantial. Countries with large out-of-pocket financing burdens such as India and China are associated with the widest gaps in resource use between insured and uninsured patients. This probably reflects both overuse by the insured and underuse by the uninsured.

What is the problem?
Progress towards reducing nuclear dangers is currently hampered by entrenched divisions between Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty members and non-members, and between Western and non-aligned states. Longstanding differences between Australia and India typify this problem.

What should be done?
New partnerships and platforms for dialogue would expand the space for agreement and new thinking. An unconventional diplomatic partnership between India and Australia could be a test bed for the larger challenge of how to bridge old divides on nuclear and security issues.

Early steps in such a partnership would include a leaders' statement identifying common aims in reducing nuclear dangers. Nonproliferation export controls could be a primary area of cooperation. Canberra should promote Indian involvement in the so-called Australia Group on chemical and biological weapons export controls, including to raise comfort levels between New Delhi and other nonproliferation arrangements.

A new bilateral nuclear dialogue could consider the prevention of illicit nuclear transfers at sea, the negotiation of a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, the security of nuclear energy growth in Southeast Asia, the reduced role of nuclear arms in defence postures, and recommendations from the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament sponsored by Australia and Japan.

(Excerpt) According to climate scientists, averting the worst consequences of climate change requires that the increase in global temperature should be limited to 2°C (or 3.6°F). to achieve that objective, global emissions of green house gases (GHGs)—the main human cause of global warming—must be reduced to 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2050.

The key to successful climate change abatement at those scales lies in leveraging the collective actions of developed and developing countries. Cumulatively, developed countries have been responsible for most human emissions of GHGs. that picture will be quite different in the future as emissions from the developing world take over the top mantle. Given this dynamic, there is a general agreement internationally that developed countries will lead emissions reductions efforts and that developing countries will follow with “nationally ap- propriate mitigation actions.” turning that agreement into environmentally beneficial action requires close international coordination between the developed and developing countries in allocating the responsibility for the necessary reductions and following up with credible actions. However, the instruments employed so far to promote the necessary collective action have proved to be insufficient, unscalable, and questionable in terms of environmental benefit and economic efficiency.

Currently, the most important and visible link be- tween developed and developing countries’ efforts on climate change is the Clean development Mechanism (CdM). the CdM uses market mechanisms—the “carbon markets”—to direct funding from developed countries to those projects in developing countries that lead to reductions in emissions of warming gases. In reality, the experience with the CdM has been mixed at best since its inception in 2006. while the CdM has successfully channeled funding to many worthy projects that reduce emissions of warming gasses, it has also spawned myriad projects with little environmental benefits. overall, the CdM has led to a significant overpayment by developed countries for largely dubious emissions reductions in developing countries.

What ails the Pakistani polity? Since its emergence from the detritus of the British Indian Empire in 1947, it has witnessed four military coups (1958, 1969, 1978 and 1999), long periods of political instability and a persistent inability to consolidate democratic institutions. It also witnessed the loss of a significant portion of its territory (East Pakistan) in 1971 following the brutal suppression of an indigenous uprising in the aftermath of which some ten million individuals sough refuge in India. The flight of the refugees to India and the failure to reach a political resolution to the crisis precipitated Indian military intervention and culminated in the creation of the new state of Bangladesh.

Pakistan's inability to sustain a transition to democracy is especially puzzling given that India too emerged from the collapse of British rule in South Asia. In marked contrast to Pakistan, it has only experienced a brief bout of authoritarian rule (1975-1977) and has managed to consolidate democracy even though the quality of its democratic institutions and their performance may leave much to be desired.

A number of scholars have proffered important explanations for Pakistan's failure to make a successful transition to democracy. This essay will argue that all the extant explanations are, at best, partial and incomplete. It will then demonstrate that the roots of Pakistan's propensity toward authoritarianism must be sought in the ideology, organization and mobilization strategy of the movement for the creation of Pakistan.

Using new field-level and international survey evidence we highlight one channel via which weak legal institutions may lower Indian productivity and growth. We provide evidence that top executives in Indian firms are highly centralized and do not delegate functional responsibility and decision making to middle-management. Case-study evidence and large-scale firm surveys suggest executives fear that managers will misappropriate firm assets given the opportunity to do so, in part because the weak legal system is unlikely to successfully punish the culprits and recover the assets. As a result, firms' growth potential is limited because of the limited time and attention of the top executives. This can help explain why Indian firms are smaller on average than those in the US or Europe. It can also explain why there is less reallocation of capital and labor from low productivity to high productivity firms in India, since otherwise-successful firms find it harder to grow. As a result, weak legal institutions may play a potentially important role in reducing aggregate productivity and growth in India.

The significant increase in the role of international trade in the economic development of nations over the last few decades has been accompanied by a considerable increase in the number of commercial disputes as well. In India too, rapid globalization of the economy and the resulting increase in competition has led to an increase in commercial disputes. At the same time, however, the rate of industrial growth, modernization, and improvement of socio-economic circumstances has, in many instances, outpaced the rate of growth of dispute resolution mechanisms. In many parts of India, rapid development has meant increased caseloads for already overburdened courts, further leading to notoriously slow adjudication of commercial disputes. As a result, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, including arbitration, have become more crucial for businesses operating in India as well as those doing businesses with Indian firms.

Keeping in mind the broader goal of exploring links between the quality of legal performance and economic growth, this paper is an attempt to critically evaluate arbitration in India as a legal institution. To this end, this paper presents an empirical inquiry into the state of arbitration, as well as a more theoretical examination of the political economy and arbitration as developed and practiced in India. In sum, although the huge influx of overseas commercial transactions spurred by the growth of the Indian economy has resulted in a significant increase of commercial disputes, arbitration practice has lagged behind. The present arbitration system in India is still plagued with many loopholes and shortcomings, and the quality of arbitration has not adequately developed as a quick and cost-effective mechanism for resolution of commercial disputes.

In this paper, the evolution of arbitration law and practice in India has been explored. Part I of this paper lays out the basics of arbitration in India, with a brief discussion of its history, the statutes that govern arbitration, the types of arbitration practiced, the enforcement of arbitral awards, and the costs of arbitration as compared to those of litigation. Part II explores the working of arbitration in India, while Part III is a critical analysis of the success of arbitration under the 1996 Act. Part IV briefly examines arbitration practice across regions, and the relationship between arbitration and commercial growth. Finally, Part V offers a series of recommendations for improving arbitration practice in India.

The institutional context of economic activity in India has undergone tremendous change in the past 15 years. The Government of India's launch of market-based economic reforms in 1991 was a response to a macro-economic crisis emanating from a deficit in the balance of payments. The economic dynamism that ensued thereafter has surprised many observers. Though high economic growth rates have attracted the most attention, concurrent changes in economic institutions have been no less important. During the 1980s, the Indian economy was characterized by pervasive controls on all aspects of market- functioning of industrial enterprises-entry, capacity expansion, exit, pricing and distribution. During the initial phase of the reforms, policy attention focused on stabilization of the macro-economy. It would be fair to state that there was no coherent institutional road-map that Indian reformers had in mind when the process began. The overall policies were shaped by the "Washington Consensus" model. This meant focusing on reducing the fiscal deficit and downsizing the all-encompassing role of government in economy. The original intent of industrial and trade policies were abolition of controls and trade liberalization, and these were pursued vigorously. It was only during the mid-90s that institutional change relating to government-business relations came into the policy radar. The need for better regulation in several infrastructure sectors became apparent after the failure of efforts to disinvest in and to privatize some large public sector infrastructure enterprises. Policy makers began to refer to regulatory institution building and associated legislative enactments as "second-generation" reforms. Since then, there has been a steady focus on the institutional dimension-in particular with respect to the establishment of a number of regulatory institutions.

Our paper seeks to explain the ongoing process of regulatory evolution, and the crucial role of legal process. The institutional framework governing the regulation of business enterprises may well take a decade to attain mature stability. It is important to appreciate the fact that this process of institutional reform is not being driven by any particular political agenda. It has acquired a momentum of its own. Different political coalitions have ruled the Central government since 1991 without substantially reversing the direction of institutional evolution. This paper attempts to provide an explanation of the process of evolution of a regulatory framework. In this paper, we examine the case of the Indian telecommunications industry in detail, but we believe that our basic explanatory framework is valid more generally.