စေနသင္တန္းေလး

အပတ္စဥ္တိုင္း စေနေန႔ဆိုရင္ က်ြန္မတို႔ဆီက college ေလးတခုမွာ ဖြင့္ထားတဲ့ Freelance Journalism ဒီပလိုမာသင္တန္းေလး တခုကို သြားသြားတက္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ကေလးအေမေတြ ပညာေရးတခုခုလုပ္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ စေန၊ တနဂၤေႏြဆို ဒီလိုသင္တန္းေလးေတြ ရွိတတ္တယ္။ တခ်ိဳ႕ကလဲ ပန္းအလွျပင္တာတို႔၊ မုန္႔လုပ္တာတို႔ေပါ့။ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာသင္တန္းေတြလဲ ရွိတယ္။ အစံုပဲ။ ကေလးေလးေတြကို ေက်ာင္းက ထိန္းေပးတယ္။ အားလံုးသူလိုကိုယ္လို ကေလးအေမေတြခ်ည္းပဲဆိုေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ကေလးအေၾကာင္း၊ သူ႕ကေလးအေၾကာင္းေတြလဲ အားခ်ိန္ဆို ေျပာျဖစ္၊ ဖလွယ္ျဖစ္တာေပါ့။ ပညာလဲရ၊ မိတ္ေဆြလဲရတယ္ေလ။

ဒီေန႔ေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းမွာ စာေရးသားျခင္းစတိုင္နဲ႔ပတ္သက္တာေလးေတြ သင္ျပီး၊ ေန႔လည္ပိုင္းမွာ စာၾကည့္တိုက္ထဲက ၾကိဳက္တဲ့ ေဆာင္းပါးတိုေလးတခုကို ဖတ္ျပီး၊ အဲဒီစတိုင္အတိုင္း၊ theme တူတဲ့ ကိုယ္ေရးခ်င္တဲ့အေၾကာင္းအရာေဆာင္းပါးတိုေလးကို ျပန္ေရးရတယ္။ ဘာလိုလိုနဲ႔ ေနာက္ႏွစ္လဆို ဒီသင္တန္းေလးလဲ ျပီးေတာ့မယ္။ အားအားယားယား ကုန္ဖူးတဲ႕ စေနေန႕ေလးေတြကို ျပန္ႏွေမ်ာမိတယ္။ အမွတ္ေကာင္းရင္ အဆင့္ျမင့္ ဒီပလိုမာ ဆက္တက္လုိ႕ရတယ္တဲ့။ အဲဒီက်ရင္ specialization ေရြးရမယ္ဆိုပဲ။ Fiction writing ေရြးမယ္လို႔ စိတ္ကူးတာပဲ။

ဒီေန႕ေရးျဖစ္တဲ့ ေဆာင္္းပါးတိုေလးက

Does Democracy matter for Development?

Malaysia is the star economy in South East Asia, with an average annual growth rate of over 8 per cent. It is the leading exporter of palm oil, a major exporter of tropical hardwoods and a major producer of rubber. It successfully came out of the global recession and the collapse of international tin markets. Due to the rapid structural changes, it has transformed from a primary producing country to a next-tier newly industrializing economy and attracted the largest share of foreign direct investment (FDI) within the region. It praised the international community with a stable parliamentary democracy and political developments.

Political developments in Malaysia were primarily driven by ethnic tensions and compromises. Even this is a country that practices too many state interventions in economic policies and maintenances of racial harmony. For the outside world, being a democratic country and gaining economic stability make the country a successful story.

In contrast, most of the multi-ethnic countries in the region -Burma, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka are still in conflicts, civil wars, arms struggle are regarded as the least developed countries by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). No wonder Malaysia trumpets its democracy and economic development as high as the Petronas Twin Towers.

However, in the context of neo-classical political economy, the expanded role of the state in its development plan is a recipe for disaster as it distorts the price signals. Also, its intervention policies become a fertile ground for rent-seeking and directly unproductive activities by Malay ethnic community. A recent research on Governance matters by the World Bank reveals high rates of corruption and personal interests of public-sector management. Political power readily becomes associated with economic power, and there is no question that corruption and cronyism are major forces in Malaysia.

Moreover, although it has a political system based on regular election, there is no form of bringing the adversarial democracy of most Western countries. It can also be traced the manner in which there has been a steady creep of authoritarianism within Malaysia's democracy, although without creating unresponsiveness to the wishes of groups who have a voice in the political system. The combination of highly centralized political and economic power, the absence of effective political opposition, and a concentration of interest groups in the capital cities and other large urban regions of both countries means that environmental conservation and minority-group interests in the periphery rank low in terms of both awareness and priority.

These flaws explain why, despite its democracy, Malaysia has still a poverty gap and inequality concerns. Degradation of resources and declining welfare for the majority are going hand in hand increasingly. The government Vision 2020 to alleviate poverty and inequality is still far away to achieve.

The biggest success of Malaysia democracy lies in political, economic and social stability. The national development policy formulation was made necessary by the economic needs of the nation as much as politico-social needs.

On the other hand, its biggest failure lies in the combination of highly centralized political and economic power and the absence of obvious political opposition. There has a heavily dependent on Washington DC for the policies of international financial institutions so that pressures for changes come from foreign power.

In conclusion, there is no question that Malaysia has developed with democracy and political stability, but it needs to deepen this democracy through political decentralization and market mechanisms.

References

Democracy counts by Subhash Agrawal( Developments, Issue 39, 2007)

Khin Ma Ma Myo (9/2/2008)