Htet Thiha Zaw
Research Expertise
Geographic Expertise
About
Htet Thiha Zaw is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He studies how institutions created and maintained by indigenous societies shaped historical state development in the Global South, with regional expertise in Southeast Asia and Burma (Myanmar). His research shows that indigenous political and social institutions shape long-run state development, using original data from pre-colonial and colonial records, integrating quantitative analyses of cross-section, panel, geospatial, and text-as-data with qualitative analyses from archival research.
His research has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Education Review, and International Journal of Educational Development, among other venues.
Teaching
Publications
Avanesian, Garen, Htet Thiha Zaw, Peggy Kelly, and Suguru Mizunoya. “Dissecting the Digital Divide: A
Household Fixed Effects Approach to Estimating Gender Gaps in Digital Skills of Youth in Low-and Middle-
Income Economies.” Heliyon 10, no. 12 (2024): e33127.
Zaw, Htet Thiha. “The Pre-colonial Roots of Colonial Coercion: Evidence from British Burma.” Comparative
Political Studies 57, no. 12 (2024): 1939-1977.
Zaw, Htet Thiha, Suguru Mizunoya, Dominic Richardson, Despina Karamperidou, Hiroyuki Hattori, and
Monika Oledzka-Nielsen. “Teacher Training and Textbook Distribution Improve Early Grade Reading: Evidence from Papua and West Papua.” Comparative Education Review 65, no. 4 (2021): 691-722.
Zaw, Htet Thiha, Suguru Mizunoya, and Xinxin Yu. “An Equity Analysis of Pre-primary Education in the Developing World.” International Journal of Educational Research 109 (2021): 101806.
Mizunoya, Suguru, and Htet Thiha Zaw. “Measuring the Holes of the Ship: Global Cost Estimations of Internal Inefficiency in Primary Education.” International Journal of Educational Development 54 (2017): 8-17.