East Asia's Development Research Articles

The Evolution of Educating for Sustainable Development in East Asia: A Bibliometric Review, 1991–2023

This systematic review addressed the need for documentation and analysis of the scope and topical foci of research on education for sustainable development (ESD) in East Asia. The review used descriptive, content, and keyword co-occurrence analyses to synthesize features of 1915 Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 1991 and 2023. The authors found that research interest in ESD in East Asia has grown rapidly, accelerated by the pronouncement of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in 2005 and the Sustainability Agenda 2030 in 2015. Researchers in China, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand have been the leading contributors to this regional knowledge base. Consistent with global ESD reviews, content analysis revealed that this literature emerged from studies of environmental education and gradually expanded to include sociocultural, economic, and integrated perspectives on sustainability. Keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed three thematic clusters: Environmental Sustainability in Education, Social Sustainability in Education, and Teaching and Learning for Sustainability. Temporal co-word analysis highlighted the research front, which includes environmental research focusing on carbon/energy issues, technology-enhanced learning for sustainability, empirical research methods for studying ESD, and, to a lesser degree, studies of the economic pillar of sustainability in education. Recommendations are offered for future research.

The Missing Agrarian Middle Class

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Puerto Rico embarked on one of the most rapid processes of industrialization and economic development the world had ever seen. Yet the industrial economy that this process produced had two fundamental flaws: it featured little by way of local capital formation in the manufacturing sector, and it was incapable of producing sufficient employment for the island’s labor force. What explains these flaws? This article seeks to answer this question by drawing on the rich literature on development in East Asia. I engage with four theories that explain successful East Asian development on the basis, respectively, of unique insertion into the international political economy, robust industrial policies, economic nationalism, and agrarian reform processes that preceded industrialization. While Puerto Rico benefited from all of these factors—which may explain the relative success of development on the island—they differed qualitatively from the East Asian cases, with the possible exception of international political economy. I suggest that these differences might in turn be explained by substantial differences in pre-existing agrarian class structure. The absence of a significant stratum of smallholding agricultural producers in Puerto Rico distinguished the island from East Asian societies. It also helps explain the lack of local capital formation and employment generation built into the Puerto Rican development model, as well as the shape of industrial policy and agrarian reform and the ultimate weakness of nationalist impulses.

Bond Market Development in East Asia: Issues and Challenges

Bond Market Development in East Asia: Issues and Challenges

Renewable energy consumption and business density as drivers of sustainable development

The East Asia and Pacific region have witnessed significant economic growth in recent decades, leading to improved living standards and increased energy consumption. However, this rapid development has also resulted in environmental degradation and heightened concerns about climate change. In response, countries in the region have been increasingly focusing on sustainable development, with renewable energy consumption and business density emerging as key drivers. Given this background, this research empirically examines the impact of entrepreneurship and clean technology on sustainable development in East Asia and the Pacific region. To control for endogeneity, the study applied system the Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) for the data sourced from the World Development Indicators of the World Bank for the period 2015–2021. The finding indicates that both entrepreneurship and clean technology have an adverse significant impact on sustainable development in the East Asia-Pacific region. When the regions were analysed individually, the results revealed that both entrepreneurship and clean technology have a negative substantial effect on sustainable development in East Asia, but not in the Pacific region. The study concludes that entrepreneurship and renewable energy by themselves would not result in sustainable development, except some certain conditions are met. The positive impacts of entrepreneurship and renewable energy on sustainable development can only be attained when the nature, location, and practices of new businesses are low carbon in nature.JEL Classifications: Q01, Q42, Q56

How do emotions like trust and fear shape East- Asian Security Dynamics

This article explores the subtle yet significant role of emotions in international relations, particularly focusing on East Asia's development and security dynamics. Emotions are not innate but shaped by external sociopolitical influences, and their understanding involves a combination of feelings and attitudes. The politics of emotion involves battles over entitlement and relevance of feelings, with individual, media, and state actors playing distinct roles. Emotional politics utilizes emotions as a political tool, strategically projecting emotional performances to achieve political goals. Populist politics exploit feelings of uncertainty, fear, and worry to advance their agendas. East Asia's political and social changes and ongoing conflicts involve highly emotional phenomena, such as fear and trust. This essay aims to demonstrate how emotions shape East Asian security as a fundamental political force through individual, state, and media dynamics.

Evaluation of MSWX Bias-Corrected Meteorological Forcing Datasets in China

Near-surface meteorological forcing (NSMF) datasets, mixed observations, and model forecasts are widely used in global climate change and sustainable development studies. For practical purposes, it is important to evaluate NSMF datasets, especially those released latest, and determine their strengths and limitations. In this study, we evaluate the performance of Multi-Source Weather (MSWX) in China over the period of 1979–2016. For comparison, ECMWF Reanalysis version 5 (ERA5), China Meteorological Forcing Dataset (CMFD) and Princeton Global Forcing (PGF) dataset are also evaluated to determine the strengths and weaknesses of MSWX. The following variables are compared with observations over 2400 stations: 2 m air temperature (T2m), 2 m daily maximum air temperature (Tmax), 2 m daily minimum air temperature (Tmin), precipitation (P), and 10 m wind speed (V10). The evaluation is conducted in terms of climatology, inter-annual variations and seasonal cycles. Results show that MSWX reasonably reproduces the spatial pattern of T2m with root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) below 1.12 °C and spatial correlations above 0.97, but underestimates Tmax and overestimates Tmin, with biases ranging from −2.0 °C to 2.0 °C, especially over the North China and Northeast China. Compared with ERA5 and PGF, MSWX can better simulate the inter-annual variations of surface air temperature with high spatial correlations (>0.97) but shows higher RMSEs than PGF. For precipitation, MSWX accurately captures the primary features of precipitation, including significant characteristics or patterns of the precipitation climatology and inter-annual variation. Its inter-annual variation shows low RMSEs ranging from 0.55 mm/day to 0.8 mm/day, compared to ERA5 and PGF. However, regions with abundant precipitation exhibit higher biases. Because the biased Global Wind Atlas (GWA3.1) is used for the wind bias correction of MSWX, MSWX significantly overestimates the annual mean wind speed, but it is consistently well-correlated with observations, with RMSEs less than 1.5 m/s and spatial correlations greater than 0.6 over the period of 1979–2016. This study reveals both the advantages and disadvantages of MSWX, and indicates the need for research into climate change and sustainable development in East Asia.

A State-Society Approach to Climate Policy Diffusion for Sustainable Development in East Asia

Abstract Increasingly, global efforts to combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have invoked national climate policies in the past decades. The Paris Agreement provides general guidelines for climate policy with which signatory countries are expected to comply. East Asia’s economic and political significance is rising in achieving these goals globally, but countries in the region are somewhat behind international climate norms and face criticism from global society. Moreover, despite government initiatives to achieve a sustainability transition domestically, East Asian societies are less aligned with international climate norms, prioritizing economic development over issues like climate change. As a result, governments in the region face different incentives for their policy options. This paper discusses three East Asian examples from the global norm-diffusion perspective by taking a state-society approach. It argues that the top-down efforts initiated by global society will fail without domestic societies embracing international efforts.

Studies on the Requirement of Transthyretin Protein (BxTTR-52) for the Suppression of Host Innate Immunity in Bursaphelenchus xylophilus

The pinewood nematode, Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, has been determined as one of the world's top ten plant-parasitic nematodes. It causes pine wilt, a progressive disease that affects the economy and ecologically sustainable development in East Asia. B. xylophilus secretes pathogenic proteins into host plant tissues to promote infection. However, little is known about the interaction between B. xylophilus and pines. Previous studies reported transthyretin proteins in some species and their strong correlation with immune evasion, which has also been poorly studied in B. xylophilus. In this study, we cloned and functionally validated the B. xylophilus pathogenic protein BxTTR-52, containing a transthyretin domain. An in situ hybridization assay demonstrated that BxTTR-52 was expressed mainly in the esophageal glands of B. xylophilus. Confocal microscopy revealed that BxTTR-52-RFP localized to the nucleus, cytoplasm, and plasma membrane. BxTTR-52 recombinant proteins produced by Escherichia coli could be suppressed by hydrogen peroxide and antioxidant enzymes in pines. Moreover, silencing BxTTR-52 significantly attenuated the morbidity of Pinus thunbergii infected with B. xylophilus. It also suppressed the expression of pathogenesis-related genes in P. thunbergii. These results suggest that BxTTR-52 suppresses the plant immune response in the host pines and might contribute to the pathogenicity of B. xylophilus in the early infection stages.

Human capital development in East Asia: An empirical implication for Vietnam’s education and training needs

Human capital development is a contemporary issue facing Vietnam's academia, private organizations, and public policymakers. This paper illustrates Singapore as one of the highly developed countries in East Asia that successfully invests, designs, and manages human capital, asset, and resources for its economic growth. The discussion suggests certain propositions with a conceptual framework as an empirical implication to Vietnamese counterparts for further examining the relationships among human capital investment, human asset development, and human resources in the context of Vietnamese education and training needs.

Commentary: Language teacher motivation, autonomy and development in East Asia.

Commentary: Language teacher motivation, autonomy and development in East Asia.

Success Factors of East Asian Economic Development: Learnings for a Developing Country like Bangladesh

This article has tried to explore the success factors of East Asian economic development by highlighting seven "stylized realities," which include the contributions of structural change and technological change to industrialization and growth, as well as the functions of governments, productivity, investment, and exports. This piece of writing also highlights what other emerging nations such as Bangladesh can learn from the history of East Asian economic development. This is a theoretical study that relied on secondary data. Reference journals, books, local and foreign articles, working papers, websites of relevant organizations, and local and international newspapers were used to compile the data. This essay contends that Bangladesh can learn valuable lessons from East Asia's development experience. However, "development" cannot be directly copied from elsewhere because it is the result of specific socially structured conditions and the process of changing those conditions. Different economies and institutions may learn different lessons from East Asia, depending on the problems they face, their desire and ability to address problems, as well as the circumstances under which they do so.

The Political Economy of Sukuk Development in East Asia: A Comparative Study from South Korea and Taiwan

Sukuk is an alternative financial instrument for investing in the form of bonds. Compared with conventional bonds, Sukuk offers investors an asset distribution model and a fair return of profit and risk-sharing. Sukuk also prohibits the imposition of interest rates. The development of Sukuk in the East Asia region has shown a positive trend because of its profitable principle for medium- to long-term investment in supporting economic development and stability. South Korea and Taiwan are countries that are relatively new in developing Sukuk compared with China, Hong Kong, and Japan. This research aims to understand the development of Sukuk in these two countries from a political economy perspective. This research employs a qualitative method and compares how South Korea and Taiwan implement their policies in developing Sukuk using an approach from three aspects: political leadership, world economic order, and cultural factors. The data to be used is sourced from secondary data from government documents, central banks, and financial authorities.

Experience, communication, and collective action: financial autonomy and capital market development in East Asia

ABSTRACT From the creation of the eurozone to the African Financial Markets Initiative, the world has seen the emergence of regional financial institutions in recent decades. East Asia is no exception. ASEAN plus Three (China, Japan, and Korea) has institutionalised the Asian Bond Marked Initiative (ABMI) since 2003. What explains the development of the ABMI? We argue that East Asian states established it as an institutional mechanism for regional financial autonomy constrained by their dependence on Western financial market. In making this argument, we propose an experience-communication analytical framework to systematically investigate the formation of collective economic interests. We show that the analytical framework captures the timing and the content of the institutional evolution of the ABMI with greater precision. To demonstrate our claim, we attempt to make best use of both qualitative process tracing and quantitative collocational analysis for the validity and reliability of our claim. Particular attention is paid to analysing the politics of inclusion and exclusion in membership as ASEAN plus Three states shifted the forum for regional bond market cooperation from the APEC, of which the United States is a member, to the ABMI, which excludes the United States in pursuing regional financial autonomy.

Confucian Democracy in East Asia: A Discussion of Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy

Confucian Democracy in East Asia: A Discussion of Sungmoon Kim’s <i>Democracy After Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy</i>

Analysis of the Interactions between the 200 hPa Jet and Air Pollutants in the Near-Surface Layer over East Asia in Summer

The rapid economic development in East Asia has led to serious air pollution problems in the near-surface layer. Studies have shown that there is an interaction between air pollution and the East Asian upper-level jet, which is an important weather system controlling the climate in East Asia. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the relationship between the surface layer air pollutants and the upper-level jet stream in East Asia. Based on the daily wind and vertical velocity data provided by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research as well as the surface pollutant and meteorological variable data provided by the Science Data Bank, we use statistical analysis methods to study the relationship between the East Asian upper-level jet and the high-concentration area of near-surface air pollutants in summer. Meanwhile, the mechanisms of the interaction are preliminarily discussed. The results show that the North China Plain and the Tarim Basin are the high-value areas of the particulate matter (PM) in summer during 2013–2018, and the ozone (O3) concentration in the near-surface atmospheric layer in the North China Plain is also high. The average concentrations of the PM2.5, PM10 and O3 in the North China Plain are 45.09, 70.28 and 131.27 μg·m−3, respectively, and the days with the concentration exceeding the standard reach 401, 461 and 488, respectively. During this period, there is an increasing trend in the O3 concentration and a decreasing trend in the PM concentration. The average ratio of the PM2.5 to PM10 is approximately 0.65 with a decreasing trend. The air pollutant concentration in this region has a significant relationship with the location of the East Asian upper-level jet. The low wind speed at the surface level under the control of the upper-level jet is the main reason for the high pollutant concentration besides the pollutant emission. They relate to each other through the surface humidity and the meridional and zonal wind. Meanwhile, the concentrations of the PM2.5 and PM10 are high in the near-surface layer in the Tarim Basin, and the average concentrations are 45.19 and 49.08 μg·m−3, respectively. The days with the concentration exceeding the standard are 265 and 193, respectively. The interannual variation in the PM concentration shows an increasing trend first and then a decreasing trend. The average ratio of PM2.5 to PM10 in this region reaches approximately 0.9. The ratio reaches the highest in 2013 and 2014 and then decreases to and maintains at approximately 0.85. The concentration of air pollutants in the basin has a significant relationship with the intensity of the upper-level jet in East Asia. The weakening of the upper-level jet will lead to a decrease in the surface humidity in the northern part of the basin, an increase in the surface temperature in the western part of the basin and a decrease in the surface zonal wind in the eastern part of the basin, which will result in a higher PM concentration.

Rethinking Campaigns, Bureaucracy, and Rural Development in East Asia and Beyond

Rethinking Campaigns, Bureaucracy, and Rural Development in East Asia and Beyond Julia C. Strauss (bio) Kristen Looney's Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia is a wonderful book that engages simultaneously on at least three fronts. It chooses an important but overlooked phenomenon that intersects with sub-literatures concerned with the East Asian developmental state, rural development, and campaigns. Adding to this already significant set of ambitions, Looney engages in what one might call three and a half comparisons: Taiwan, South Korea, and China, with Japan being the extra half. Japan is never fully elaborated as a case study, but, as Looney recognizes, the country looms large in the background for both Taiwan and South Korea, and therefore at one remove for China as well. And if all this were not enough, Mobilizing for Development also ranges across two asynchronous time periods: the 1950s to 1970s, but focusing on the 1970s, for Taiwan and South Korea; and the 1980s to the 2000s for China, centering heavily on the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao years of 2003–13. The sub-literatures incorporated, the time periods traversed, and the difficulties of working on and in such different places as Taiwan, Korea, and China with both historical and contemporary materials, to mention nothing of the obvious importance of the questions addressed, all make Mobilizing for Development an exemplary piece of comparative case study and historical sociological research. It makes me, for one, want to stand up and salute this achievement, right before assigning the book to every postgraduate class I have ever taught or have yet to teach in Chinese politics or comparative development and handing it out as a "how to do it" model to every prospective PhD student contemplating comparative and historical research. Looney's particular gift for this research lies in her consistent ability to steer between the Scylla of unnecessary detail and the Charybdis of undue violence to her case study material. What emerges is a clear and convincing argument that is well supported by evidence. Given that literature on the East Asian developmental state consistently overlooks the rural sector after land reform, her focus on the countryside reveals a pattern [End Page 141] equally overlooked: that the East Asian developmental states implemented campaigns rather than straight-up technocracies to bring development to rural areas. After this significant corrective to this literature, Looney then lays out the very different ways in which campaigns of rural development played out in these three locales with a spectrum of results ranging from highly effective (Taiwan) to mixed (South Korea) to ineffective (China). In analyzing the factors behind these different campaign outcomes, the book argues—to my mind, quite convincingly—that the effectiveness of rural development campaigns was in turn a function of whether intermediary rural organizations, particularly farmers' organizations, were linked to higher levels of the state while being simultaneously autonomous from the state. High levels of farmer participation and financial and managerial independence in turn gave these organizations a certain degree of voice and influence over rural policy (p. 39). Measured against these two variables, farmers' organizations in Taiwan possessed both; South Korea's had linkages to higher levels of the state, but not autonomy from it; and those in China had neither linkages nor autonomy. The book's argument is so neat, the questions raised so compelling, and the execution of the comparative and empirical work so exemplary that it seems almost churlish to query some of its analytical premises. But reviews being what they are, some degree of quibble is de rigueur. Mine is less a quibble than a sense that, fantastic as this monograph is, there are a number of important conceptual opportunities lost. This is particularly true with respect to the notion of "campaign" and how campaigns in turn relate to institutions, most notably the bureaucratic institutions of the state. But to simply define a state campaign as "policies that demand high levels of mobilization to achieve dramatic change" (p. 27) and rural modernization campaigns as "policies that aim to transform the countryside through bureaucratic and popular mobilization" (p. 29) is to define them as blunt analytical constructs. Because campaigns are by definition "extraordinary...

What Accounts for Rural Development in East Asia?

What Accounts for Rural Development in East Asia?

The role of social innovation policy in social service sector reform: Evidence from Hong Kong

AbstractThis article illustrates how the term “social innovation” is used in the public policy domain in Hong Kong in relation to the new public management (NPM) reform of the social service sector, which originated in the early 2000s. Through document reviews and interviews, the role that social innovation policy has played in instigating changes in the contemporary social service field in the post-NPM era is identified. This includes facilitating emergence of “new” forms of social entrepreneurial activities to fill unmet social needs, empowering new actors in entering the social service sector, and reinforcing the government’s position in the NPM reform. Adopting historical institutionalism as the analytical framework, multiple path-dependent characteristics arising from the historical legacies of the incumbent social service environment – such as the longstanding partnership between the state and non-profits – are highlighted. These historical factors have weakened the efficacy of the policy efforts aimed at enacting institutional change. Overall, this article demonstrates how historical context matters in the emergence and framing of social innovation policy. It contributes to the theorisation of the role of social innovation in social service sector development in East Asia.

ОЦЕНКА СДЕРЖИВАЮЩИХ ФАКТОРОВ РАЗВИТИЯ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОГО БИЗНЕСА В ВОСТОЧНО-АЗИАТСКОМ РЕГИОНЕ И ПУТИ ИХ ПРЕОДОЛЕНИЯ

The East Asian Region is one of the most dynamically developing regions in the global economy and international business. Any East Asian company strives to become international and gain new development opportunities, maximize profits. Asian entrepreneurs are increasingly competing with European and American companies every year. Despite these outstanding results, there are a number of social and economic factors holding back business development in East Asia. This article assesses the main problems of international business development in the countries of the East Asian region, developed an algorithm for successful func-tioning within the framework of international business for East Asian entrepreneurs.

Embedding food in place and rural development: Insights from the Bluefin Tuna Cultural Festival in Donggang, Taiwan

This paper examines the role of the “Bluefin Tuna Cultural Festival” in developing and sustaining regional identities within the context of rural regeneration, sustainability, and the creation of closer relationships between production and consumption in the countryside. It focuses on Donggang, Southern Taiwan, an area with rural development issues, increasing tourism impacts, and contested issues of local identity, sustainability, and an aging society. This paper draws on public discourse and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in Donggang to understand the conditions required for substantiating authenticity of the gastronomic products and experiences and the promotion of an appealing gastronomic image. This study traces the process of embedding bluefin tuna in Donggang through marketing, branding and provides a preliminary conceptualization of interrelations between gastronomic tourism and community development in East Asia. The paper draws attention to these particular issues issues: the commodification of local heritage and countryside capital, strategies and challenges of hosting culinary festivals and resolving the issue of return migration.