Working paper
Who bears the burden of climate variability? A comparative analysis of the impact of weather conditions on inequality in Vietnam and Indonesia
This collection of papers comprises materials contributed for discussions at three international conferences held at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies, The Russian Academy of Sciences from 2010 through 2012. The collection consists of six sections covering the main areas of Vietnamese studies and touching upon various aspects of Vietnam’s internal and foreign policies as well as social and cultural life in the country during its long history.
Religion, ethnicity, and politics are typical explanatory variables of violent conflicts. From an economic point of view, economic growth reduces the risk of civil war, yet the economic determinants of conflict have been little studied. In this article, we empirically study the impact of regional macroeconomic conditions on the number of violent conflicts in Indonesia, a country with potential risks of communal conflict because of the plurality of its society. We use panel data consisting of observations on 16 Indonesian regions from 2004 to 2013 to assess the impact of economic factors on conflict, reevaluating the religion effect using dynamic models (SYS GMM estimator). Our findings suggest that only the inflation rate predicts the conflict growth rate. Economic growth, economic development, poverty, and even religion, do not significantly affect the number of regional conflicts.
The article focuses on the ethnic and confessional diversity of Indonesia, as well as mechanisms of supporting it in the framework of the country’s rapid economic development and active involvement into globalization processes.
This paper is devoted to different genres of call-and-response songs in Vietnam. The call-and-response song is an antiphonal song dialogue between female and male singers. The main differences between the genres of call-and-response are related to the location and the season when they are performed. Antiphonal singing of this kind is not a distinctive feature of Viets. Similar types of singing are widely represented throughout the country among different ethnic minorities. Moreover, song dialogues are also widespread among the ethnic minorities of China and in other countries of East and South-East Asia. In Vietnam these genres have become extremely popular and exist in a variety of forms.
In modern Vietnam, the Viet (or the Kinh, the ethnic Vietnamese) and the Muong are considered to be two different peoples, the Viet (Kinh) being the majority and the Muong a minority. In the not so distant past, however, when Vietnam’s population did not see itself in ethnic categories, the only difference between the Viet and Muong ancestors lay in their places of residence – the inhabitants of the capital city and the surrounding plains were named ‘Kinh’ while those who lived in mountain villages were called ‘Muong’. Otherwise, they were the same people, spoke nearly the same language and shared nearly the same traditions. Their commonality is emphasized in the term they are referred to by, i.e. the Viet-Muong. This chapter explores the Vietnamese and Muong languages, dialects, legends, epics and folk songs in a comparative perspective to reveal their similarities, discrepancies, influences and politics. The panelists’ goal is to identify phenomena which are specific for the Viet-Muong community as a whole and those that divide them into two separate groups - the Viet and the Muong.