Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, EAF

Many are familiar with the demographic challenge that China faces with a very rapidly aging population over the next two decades or so, partly a result of the one-child policy.

China’s population is expected to grow from just over 1.3 billion to 1.46 billion in 2030, after which it is expected to decline slowly, to around 1.42 billion in 2050. Read more…

Authors: Zhongwei Zhao, ANU, and Wei Chen, People’s University of China

The gender imbalance in China is perhaps the most worrying demographic change that has been taking place in recent decades.

China’s sex ratio at birth (SRB), which measures the number of male live births per hundred female live births, was within the normal range of between 103 to 107 throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Read more…

Author: Homi Kharas, Brookings Institution

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development has just celebrated its 50^th anniversary. Among the many achievements of this group of advanced economies is the unprecedented improvement in the material lives of millions of their citizens.

Between 1960 and 2010, the number of people who had middle class or better living standards in OECD member countries more than doubled from around 400 million to over 900 million. Poverty, by global standards, was essentially eradicated. Read more…

Author: Ray Hervandi, East-West Center

Indonesia’s initiation of democratic reforms in May 1998 did not portend well for Chinese Indonesians.

Constituting less than 5 percent of Indonesia’s 240 million people and concentrated in urban areas, Chinese Indonesians were, at that point, still reeling from the anti-Chinese riots that had occurred just before Suharto’s fall. Scarred by years of repression and forced assimilation under Suharto, many Chinese Indonesians were uncertain — once again — about what the ‘new’ Indonesia had in store for them. Read more…

Author: Donald K. Emmerson, Stanford University

‘Bin Laden Dead: Muslim World Reacts,’ announced ABC-TV. An Afghan rickshaw driver likened him to ‘a hero in the Muslim world.‘ Far from a hero, said a Pakistani professor, ‘he was a problem for the whole Muslim world.’

‘For the Muslim world,’ his death was like the lifting of a curse, wrote the Islamic Society of North America. According to the staff of eCanadaNow, ‘the Muslim world is reeling’ because Bin Laden was buried at sea in violation of the Muslim tradition that allows for that practice only if the deceased actually died there Read more…

I argued recently in the Australian Literary Review that the unpredictable natural disasters of Japan — the 9.0 earthquake, 10 meter tsunami and nuclear crisis — should not be shoehorned unnecessarily into a broader narrative about the direction of Japanese society, but it is still important to consider the wider implications of the tragedies.

In particular, the human tragedy of the 11 March disasters in Japan has an interesting demographic angle. Read more…

Author: Iftekharul Bashar, RSIS

While the world remains engrossed in debates triggered by Wikileaks, a new threat from cyberspace is emerging.

Social networking sites have now become a potential space for recruiting extremists. This could be called the Facebook jihad. Read more…

Author: Mukul G. Asher, NUS

Asian countries have traditionally seen rapid economic growth as their most important priority. Unfortunately, this has meant that, to a large extent, they have been unable to construct adequate, accessible and robust social protection systems.

Social protection systems typically involve retirement income security (or pensions), accessible and affordable healthcare, arrangements to address work injury and related contingencies, and social assistance. Read more…

Author: Bill Durodié, Nanyang Technological University

Much of the discussion in the West about ageing populations also occurs in Asia. Yves Guerard, the Secretary-General of the International Actuarial Association, has compared these discussions to ‘climate change’; he sees the issue of an ageing population as a ‘big, immediate urgent problem’ that is largely ignored ‘because it’s inconvenient’.

But a recent report challenges this framing. Read more…

Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU

The Japanese economy is frozen and faces large challenges (with an externally-led expansion from 2001 to 2006 just saving it from two lost decades of economic growth). Deflation is back due to over capacity and depressed domestic demand – a hangover from the rapid expansion and bubble period in the 1980s – and public debt is close to 200 per cent of GDP and rising.

The structure of the debt (95 per cent of which is domestically held) and the low interest rate being paid on the bonds to finance them means this problem may not be so bad as it looks. Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale, ANU

‘Sometimes Japan seems to be on the wrong continent’ writes Michael Schuman from Time Magazine perceptively. ‘Everywhere else in Asia, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Jakarta, there is an aura of perpetual motion, a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. The region is on a frenetic 365-day-a-year hurtle into a brighter future. Japan once shared Asia’s dynamism and mission. But not anymore. Today, Japan is an island of inertia in an Asia in constant flux. Japan’s political leadership is paralyzed, its corporate elite befuddled, its people agonized about the future. While Asia lurches forward, Japan inches backward’. And nobody seems able to do very much about it.

What drives these perceptions of Japanese stasis? Read more…

Author: Geremie R. Barmé

The people that the Chinese are often most worried about are other Chinese.

Chinese living and working abroad have played an enormous role in the country’s economic boom. For years, they have sent money back and offered hope to those at home during periods of calamity and chaos.

Yet holding a foreign passport doesn’t make these expatriates any less Chinese. Of all people, they are expected to be most attuned to the complex realities of life in China. When they fall short, they are treated with official suspicion and individual disdain. Read more…

Author: Boonwara Sumano, University of London

The future of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states is a source of considerable discussion, with economic recession, internal and interstate conflict, and environmental degradation remaining top concerns. This decade signals the increasing significance of another issue in the structure of member countries’ populations.

The ASEAN Statistical Yearbook 2008 reports that population in most ASEAN countries is declining. Read more…

Authors: Raghbendra Jha, ANU; Raghav Gaiha, Delhi; and Manoj Pandey, ANU

One of the paradoxes of modern India is the coexistence of high rates of economic growth and widespread malnutrition. Thus, between 2000 and 2005, real GDP per head and real per capita consumption grew at impressive rates of 5.4 per cent and 3.9 per cent per annum respectively. Yet more than 75 per cent of the population has a daily per capita calorie consumption below the minimum requirements for Indians. Concurrently, the food subsidy bill has been rising rapidly and was a staggering Rs 370 billion for households beneath the poverty line (BPL) in 2009-10.

Now, the government is seeking to enact a National Food Security bill (NFSB) which purports to provide 25 kilograms of rice or wheat per month to each BPL family at Rs 3 per kilogram, failing which, a poor person can seek redress. Read more…

Author: Amitendu Palit, ISAS, Singapore

Chinese and Indian demographies will be rather different three decades hence. What kind of economic outcomes are the differences expected to create?

With 1.4 billion and 1.2 billion people respectively, China and India currently account for 37 per cent of the world population. Thirty years later, they are expected to account for roughly the same share of world population. The overall numbers, however, hide some fundamental changes that will have occurred by then. Read more…