Global Recovery, New Risks and Sustainable Growth: Repositioning South Asia

The volume captures the rich discourse of the Fourth South Asia Economic Summit (SAES IV) and the ideas that originated from it. Thus the volume embodies a compendium of selected articles presented at the various sessions of the event, summaries of discussions taking place at various plenaries and statements made by dignitaries who addressed the event. SAES IV was hosted by CPD in Dhaka in October 2011. The volume focuses on a set of cross-cutting issues and a cluster of thematic issues. These issues include current global recovery and its implications, inclusive growth and regional cooperation, accelerating trade and investment, promoting energy and transport connectivity, ensuring food security, managing water resources and climate change, streamlining international migration and remittance flow, and strengthening the role of non-state actors. Recommendations originating from the SAES IV were forwarded to the appropriate focal points of the preparatory process of the Seventeenth SAARC Summit which was held in Maldives, in November 2011. The volume will hopefully provide the readership with a unique opportunity to appreciate how major stakeholders perceive the idea of deepening South Asian integration, how barriers and irritants to regional integration could be addressed, what role civil and political actors could play in this regional dynamics, and how best South Asia could take advantage of closer cooperation in a crisis-afflicted global economy. The volume, thus, represents both scholarship and vision, evidence and ideas, rigour of analyses and boldness of thoughts. Justifiably enough, the volume reflects the backdrop of global economic crisis in which SAES IV took place and the implications that the crisis had for the economies of South Asia. At the same time, writings in the volume try to anticipate the shifting fortunes in a changing world with its attendant risks and anticipated rewards for South Asia.