Development, Urbanization, Migration, and Quality of Life - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 99

PRIV ATIZATION
As development proceeds, demand for public services,
infrastructure, and shelter rises. Not only do sizable
debts and shortage of revenues constrain governments,
but also corruption, patronage, and mismanagement fre-
quently render state-owned enterprises money losers.
Efficiency is precluded by labyrinthine regulations and
bureaucracies. For example, it can take as long as
10 years to get a private phone installed in Pakistan.
Community phones are the rule in most Asian countries,
and call completion rates are generally low . But with the
advent of cheap cell phones, networks of interpersonal
and business communication are becoming ubiquitous.
Growing dissatisfaction with central planning and
government management of services has promoted priva-
tization in various forms. Public assets or enterprises
might be sold to private investors, as in Bangladesh. Or as
in China, public agencies are corporatized and required to
cover costs and manage operations more efficiently . More
commonly , governments pursue policies encouraging
private-sector participation in public service provision.
Countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, and South Korea
are promoting public service delivery by community , reli-
gious, or professional NGOs, cooperatives, and small
operators. The Roman Catholic Church operates schools
in the Philippines, and physicians' groups have opened
clinics in crowded urban areas of Vietnam.
According to the WB in 2007, privatization has in-
creased in Asia. For example, Myanmar (Burma) has pri-
vatized 288 businesses in an effort to attract foreign
investment. Even communist Vietnam is allowing some
degree of privatization, although the government retains
over 50 percent of the company . Pakistan also has drawn
in foreign money via privatization.

market principles. ODA is frequently siphoned off to pet
projects for political reasons or to mega-projects tied to
purchases from donor nations. A country might be re-
quired to import capital-intensive equipment—road-
grading machinery , for instance. Such equipment gets the
job done faster but also replaces labor in circumstances of
already high unemployment.
SAPs incorporate the notion that women' is labor is
elastic in the face of household survival needs. Poor urban
women under SAPs had to work harder inside and
outside the home to compensate for the rising cost of so-
cial services and diminished male incomes. Increased or
new fees limited their access to education and health care.
Finally , because of administrative costs, less than a
quarter of ODA ever reaches the poor people it is in-
tended to help. Most experts, including the OECD and
WB, have recently denounced SAPs and similar modes of
“development” as failures.

NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
(NGOs)
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) reflect con-
temporary culture-based perceptions of the development
process. All have an agenda—some political, some hu-
manitarian, others religious. Nevertheless, NGOs tend to
focus in peripheral settings such as urban slums and dis-
advantaged rural areas. Many NGOs are involved in
health and human resource assistance programs. Ideally ,
culturally derived development models and programs
can be articulated with larger, international frameworks
of change. Unfortunately , disparity between the ideal and
the real seems unavoidable.
Because they address people' s grievances and could
become rallying points for political protest, NGOs are seen
as potentially threatening by some governments. Indonesia,
Malaysia, and other countries attempt to rein in NGO
activities with tight controls and bureaucratic minutiae.
Other countries, such as South Korea, have more comfort-
able relationships. Here, more than 20,000 NGOs main-
tain projects in areas ranging from environmental
protection to political freedom and women' s rights.
Some scholars argue that NGOs are really “soft
imperialism” because major ones are captive to the agenda
of international donors. Also, grassroots are dependent
on the international NGOs. For all the glowing rhetoric
about self-help, democracy , and strengthening of civil
society , actual power relationships, at least in the large
NGO realm, resemble traditional patronage.

Air Space

Privatization has affected the passenger airline
industry . State-owned Singapore Airlines and
Malaysia Airlines were privatized in 1985, and
Thai Airways International and Philippine Airlines
were privatized in 1992.
Philippine Air Lines (PAL) offers an excellent
example of privatization, globalization, and the role of
overseas Chinese. PAL has had its ups and downs,
and the government has had to take over in times of
economic crisis. However, in order to cut costs, in
2000, it sold its maintenance sector to a German-led