Half Of Asia Research Articles

Contemporary Economic and Social Policy for Inclusive Growth

Asia’s dramatic economic growth and technological progress mask daunting development challenges. Left unaddressed, these challenges jeopardize Asia’s gains and undermine its future prospects. Asia is at a critical economic, political, and social juncture, and the changes taking place will determine how the region develops into the future. David Arnold, President, The Asia Foundation, 2016 Over the past two decades, Asian societies saw abrupt changes in their political, social, and economic spheres. Rapid and sustained economic growth lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Well over half of Asia’s residents are now middle class and Asia is the engine of economic growth across the globe. This tremendous growth and its impact, however, are by no means uniform. The extent and type of change varied within and between countries, and many populations did not reap the same benefits as others. Significant pockets of poverty still exist throughout the region. In fact, two-thirds of the world’s poor live in Asia. Recent data suggest that more than 800,000,000 Asians exist on less than USD 1.25 a day and 1,700,000,000 live on less than USD 2 (Kuroda, 2013). Life in Asia is especially challenging for populations living in the margins of ever expanding mega-cities, isolated rural areas, areas affected by conflict, and groups that are marginalized and excluded due to biased government systems and services or social prejudices. The fast pace of political, social, and economic change in Asia is particularly striking and often presents additional challenges. Technology facilitates or accelerates many changes, often too quickly to fully understand their impact. For example, the economic sphere saw a reduction in the role of agriculture, rapid urbanization, greater industrialization, and, in some areas, growth in the service sector. Wage labor has become the most common form of employment in many Asian countries, yet regular wages often cannot provide basic needs. Other challenges continue to emerge. Asia faces demographic crises with lower birth rates and ageing populations. Inequality is a critical issue globally, and, with high concentrations of wealth and power increasingly evident in Asia, inequality also takes center stage in the region. Today, profound inequalities in wealth, income, and welfare exist across Asia. Speaking to the Organisation for Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2013 on Asia’s challenges, towards the end of his tenure as President of the Asian Development Bank, Haruhiko Kuroda characterized the challenge this way: In many countries, the richest 1 percent of households account for close to 10 percent of total consumption and the top 5 percent account for more than 20 percent. The Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, has increased in much of the region: taking developing Asia as a single unit, the Gini coefficient has increased from 39 to 46. And the gap is not only in income. Inequality of opportunity is prevalent and is a crucial factor in widening income inequality. For example, school-ae children from households in the poorest income quintile are up to five times more likely to be out of primary and secondary school than their peers in the richest quintile; infant mortality rates among the poorest households were 10 times higher than those among the affluent households; in South Asia, women’s [labor] force participation is only 40 percent that of men’s; and in Central and West Asia, girls’ primary and secondary school enrolment levels are 20 percent lower than those of boys. For developing Asia as a whole, 1.7 billion people (45 percent of the population) lack access to sanitation (Kuroda, 2013). Across Asia, rising inequality negatively impacts many people’s opportunities, income-earning capacity, health, and well-being. In Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty suggests that growing inequality between rich and poor is the normal state of affairs in market-based economic systems. Tracing trends back three centuries, Piketty argues that periods in which inequality decreases are the exception rather than the rule (2014). Piketty’s argument further complicates the idea of addressing the inequality challenges in Asia.(...)

Availability and variability in guidelines on diabetic retinopathy screening in Asian countries

BackgroundDiabetic retinopathy (DR) is a blinding yet treatable complication of diabetes. DR screening is highly cost-effective at reducing blindness. Amidst the rapidly growing diabetic population in Asia, the prevalence of...

For a Fistful of Sitars

For a Fistful of Sitars Gabriele Ferraris (bio) Translated by Laurence de Richemont (bio) August 1971. The crème de la crème of international rock was appearing at Madison Square Garden, summoned by George Harrison for a memorable concert in support of Bangladesh, then wasting away due to a terrible famine. Ravi Shankar took the stage. The Indian musician picked up his sitar. The first notes glided over the thronging crowds. After a few seconds, the music stopped. And the audience exploded in an ovation. Ravi Shankar thanked them, and added: “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.” That sentence is the insignia and definitive interpretive key for one of the most characteristic infatuations—and most curious misunderstandings—of the counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s. The rules of classical Indian music dictate that concerts traditionally begin with the tuning of the instruments. But this was unknown to the audiences at Madison Square Garden. All they knew was that those sounds came from India. And therefore they were very cool. The rock-hard conviction of this audience in New York, during the summer of 1971, had distant origins. And, I presume, its motivations were generally something other than the appreciation (let alone the understanding) of classical Indian music. At the close of the 1950s, long before the Beatles arrived in Rishikesh and were deceived by the guru, and long before Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead went looking for inspiration in Varanasi, the passage of an oppositional Occident, autopiloting beyond the boundaries of the Western establishment toward a mysterious India (principally imagined and imaginary), was inaugurated by bus-packers, spacey seekers of the divine, hippies, freaks, globe-trotters, and young high-school dropouts, traveling from London or Amsterdam all the way to Amritsar aboard a “magic bus.” Aging Jeeps, broken-down Volkswagen vans, and London double-deckers painted with the colors of the rainbow covered in just a couple of months [End Page 741] that infinite journey from the shores of the North Sea to the Indian sub-continent. No one can say if more petrol or more LSD was consumed on those trips—without a doubt, the contest was hard-fought. With the decisive contribution of these two fuels, over the course of twenty years magic buses traversed Europe and half of Asia. Thousands of proto-tourists spilled into the country of the Vedas with reddened legs and minds full of acid-inspired, exotic sensations. Nearly all of them had pored over the sacred writings of the Beat Generation, and a few daring individuals even went on to read Hesse’s Siddhartha. But few it seemed were acquainted with Guido Gozzano’s Journey towards the Cradle of Mankind: yet those youngsters—mostly the offspring of an England, with its minor myths and rituals, not much different from Gozzano’s Turin during the early twentieth century—were the unsuspecting brothers of our melancholic poet. Gozzano in 1912 was already looking in India for an improbable form of physical and mental health, and he’d already understood everything when he wrote that “The English only went [to India] for two reasons: eating and making love.” Hippies only slightly modified the project of their colonialist grandfathers, replacing food with less nutritional but more entertaining substances. The magic buses—immortalized by the song with the same name by the Who—transported the imagination of Western youth on the brink of modernity, in a tumult of ideas and hormones. And when rock music became the common language of that generation, it seemed natural for India to become part of it, by any means necessary. Which meant that—with a few obligatory exceptions—music from that period was steeped in Indian flair, with very little India. Let’s take as our example a key episode of that infatuation (the most well-known and talked about): when the Beatles and various other celebrities of that period met with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the sojourn of the celebrated musicians in Rishikesh, in the guru’s den. Tabloids of the time wallowed in this news, but musical critics also wondered (and still do) about the influence of...

Paddy Rice and the Water Supply

AbstractOver half of Asia′s fresh water is used for growing rice. A new procedure in China has been developed to test a new water‐saving cultivation system

CNN over the Great Wall

The total estimated audience of CNN across the world has reached more than 90 million households. But how good will CNN be in Asia? Especially, how good will CNN be in China, a country that accounts for nearly half of Asia's population and has been undergoing drastic political and economical changes? Taking CNN as one representative of quickly expanding transnational media and China as one representative of newly-opened countries, this paper will examine what CNN should expect to encounter in Asia and in China in the 1990s in terms of government regulations, audience access and media competitions. It will analyse CNN's strengths and weaknesses, the network's opportunities and obstacles, and its strategies on China.

Muslim contributions to geography until the end of the 12th century AD

In the preceeding pages the story of the many-sided aspects of the Muslim contribution to geography has been related. It was a part and parcel of that new expression of an intellectual renaissance which characterized the rise of Islamic civilization. Throughout the century we come across an array of rationalist thinkers and scientists who not only resurrected the classical age but also laid the foundations of experimental science. From the beginning of the seventh century, when the Messenger of Allah, Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) began to spread Islam, the knowledge of geography was growing equally with it. They mostly knew all of Europe except the N parts, the whole S half of Asia, Africa until latitude 10° N, and the African seashore. They also gave us a very elaborate description for the areas beginning from Spain in the W until Turkestan and the Sind river to the E. They describe everything like the inhabited areas, the agricultural land, and the deserts. They also talk about the social system, culture, and customs of these areas. Their knowledge in general became greater than that of the Greek. They describe many areas which the Greek did not reach, like, for example, Korea and Japan; (Hemedah 1969) says that Japan was found in a map made by a Turkish Muslim in Baghdad in the eleventh century. If we want to classify the development of geographical knowledge of Muslims, we can say that: 1. The stage before the nineth century was full of groundless information mostly gathered by poets and fancy stories like, for example, Al Gahedh's writings. The reason for this was that the situation of Islam was unstable during the years of its proliferation at that time. 2. The stage of the nineth century. It was the era in which Muslims began to look at the Greek's and other culture' knowledge. The era can be considered as the era of constructing a basic ground of science to begin with. 3. In the stage of the tenth century Muslim geography really flourished. Many new traditions appear, like the books about countries, routes, mathematical and astronomical geography. Muslims at this stage wrote many books which taught many different topics. 4. The stage of the eleventh and twelfth century, when Muslims began to write Gazetters of Geography, like Yacut Gazetteer for example. 5. In the thirteenth century geographers were repeating what was written by the geographers of the previous centuries. Muslim geography, in addition to what we have mentioned before, had many defects or disadvantages; for example. 1. Although Muslim geographers have corrected many theories and added new information they followed the old saying by the Greek about the inhabitable area of the earth; for example, they believe that the inhabitable area of the earth lay on the N hemisphers which was called the inhabitable quarter. 2. They also followed the Greek in their ideas about the impossibility of life in the areas of intensive heat. 3. They also adopted the idea which divides the earth into seven regions from south to north (Klima). Ibn Khaldun, for example, although he was the latest of Muslims who contributed to geography he applied these ideas in his writings. Although these contradictions by the Muslims tended to impoverish their contribution to geographical knowledge, we must remember that discoveries made by Islamic people helped to further knowledge of many new areas. The fact that the close relationship between religion and knowledge functioned centrally in new discoveries suggests that the Islamic growth of knowledge differs vastly from the Western situation. Unlike the West, when Islam was at its height, knowledge rose; when Muslims faltered in their worship, however, knowledge declined. At bottom, then from the 13th century until now, Muslims have constantly attempted to return to that early ideal relationship between religion and knowledge; and when they do, Islamic culture will once again command new great discoveries.