WPS 62 The Battle of the Microbes: Smallpox, Malaria and Cholera in Southeast Asia

Disease regimes were one of the factors keeping Southeast Asian populations low, particularly in moist lowland areas, until the nineteenth century. Concentrations of population sufficient to maintain an endemic pattern of diseases such as smallpox and measles emerged relatively late, beginning with agricultural systems associated with Pagan, Angkor, and northern Vietnam around the 8th-11th centuries. …

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WPS 60 Running Just to Stay Still: Singapore’s FDI-Attraction Strategies (1965-2005)

In an era of rapid economic globalization, many national governments have been actively attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), ostensibly for purposes of encouraging local economic and social development. The proliferation of these strategies has generated intense inter-governmental competition for FDI. This paper examines the case of Singapore, a country that was relatively successful in attracting …

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Asian Population Studies (Vol. 2 No. 1)

Asian Population Studies is the first international population journal to focus exclusively on population issues in Asia. The journal publishes original research on matters related to population in this large, complex and rapidly changing region, and welcomes substantive empirical analyses, theoretical works, applied research, and contributions to methodology. Topics covered include all branches of population studies …

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WPS 58 Economic Migration and the Transnationalisation of the Rights of Foreign Workers – A Concept Note

The subject of migrants’ rights typically conjures up a legalistic understanding as it relates to international human rights law. By contrast, this paper attempts to contribute to the debate on migrants’ human rights by focusing not only on normative and legal aspects of international human rights law, but also on the issue of political participation …

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WPS 57 Foreign Manpower in Singapore: Classes, Policies and Management

The management of foreign manpower is vital for any labor import country as failure to ensure efficacy in the achievement of labor migration policies and program goals often generates a whole range of unintended consequences like xenophobia, politicization of migration, irregular migration, and eventually, cessation of labor migration programs. Despite the abundance of research on …

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WPS 56 Hotels as Sites of Power: Tourism, Status and Politics In the Himalaya

This paper is about the social and cultural significance of hotels in the Nepal Himalaya. Through a socio-semiotic approach, I analyse how the hotel in Himalayan tourism functions as an architectural form that mediates different social domains, and through the process embeds the ideology of ‘development’ in everyday life, producing the power relations that would …

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WPS 55 Nomadic Trajectories: Mapping Short Film Production in Singapore

The short film form in Southeast Asia is a potent form of cultural production and one that contributes compellingly to the development and continued growth of the region’s moving image culture. This essay provides a preliminary theoretical framework within which to map the intricacies of the short film within Southeast Asia and offers a case …

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