While malaria remains a major public health and development challenge in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), tremendous progress has been made in scaling up both preventative and curative interventions with resulting improvement in morbidity and mortality.
The GMS, including Myanmar, Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan Province in China, was burdened with about 316,000 confirmed cases of malaria and 2,000 malaria deaths in 2007, although the numbers are likely much higher because of remaining poor detection and reporting in underserved areas / populations where the disease is most likely to occur.
Last decade, a lot of countries, especially the former communist ones, managed a transition from centrally planned command economies to market economies. After these years, it is still an important issue in the countries which are not completely adjusted to market economy style, to manage the transition process in order to experience less socio-economic side effects.
One of the major sources of socio-economic side effects is price dynamic behavior in transition process. As governments usually set prices lower than their equilibrium states, transition to market economy in which price will be set in the market, creates wild fluctuations in price. In a simple word, when government set a price lower than its equilibrium state, there is a gap between supply and demand, and when government starts the transition, it takes time for supply and demand to approach to their long term equilibrium state. In this period, oscillating price gives wrong signals to supply and demand, usually, exacerbating the situation. Wild price fluctuations are not desired as they can affect other prices in short term, make social complains and restraints, and make the whole transition project fail. As a result, managing transition process in order to damp wild fluctuations in price is very crucial.
Banking regulation failed to prevent the crisis that started in the summer of 2007. One reason is that it was based on a micro-prudential approach. This involved regulating the risk taken by individual banks. The idea was that if the risk taken by each individual bank was limited then the risk in the financial system as a whole would be limited as well. The problem is that this approach ignores systemic risk. This is the risk faced by the financial system as a whole.
