Every weekday, ADB Institute, Asian Development Bank’s Tokyo-based research outfit, sends out a bulletin of e-news on Asia-Pacific, gleaned mainly from media reports, free to interested subscribers. It’s like a worm’s eye view of Asia, a continuous reality check meant to reflect and monitor a continent in change, identify problem areas, and expose the challenges and blemishes that still hide behind its gloss. Here’s a collage of Asia based on a sampling of the institute’s recent e-news bulletins:
North and Southeast Asia: Some 400 million people in China are set to move from rural areas to cities over the next 15 years. Nearly 36 million rural residents in China, or 3.8 per cent of its total rural population, lived below the poverty line at end-2009, while rural residents’ per capita net income rose to 5,153 yuan, up 8.5 per cent from a year ago. As much as 90 per cent of groundwater in the country is variously contaminated, of which 60 per cent could be seriously polluted. China has a new high-speed railway in operation, between Shanghai and Hangzhou, running at 350 km per hour. Last year, the country spent over $7 billion on smart electricity grid development, focused on transmission and distribution. China is working on new-energy vehicles and hopes to put 200 million of them on the road by 2020.
Some 700,000 new cars are expected to be sold in Indonesia this year at a time when traffic gridlock in Jakarta costs at least $1.43 billion every year. Some 42 per cent of Indonesians suffer from diarrhoea, up from 28 per cent in 1996. Minimum monthly salaries at local and foreign firms in Vietnam will go up by $5 to $15 next year. During the period from 2006 to 2010, the growth rate of residential electricity purchase in Vietnam averaged 13.7 per cent, double its GDP growth rate. In the same period, $10.4 billion was invested in new power plants. Between now and 2025, Vietnam expects to produce 1.8 million tons of ethanol and vegetable oils annually, meeting 5 per cent of the annual domestic demand for petrol and diesel. The biggest wharf in the Mekong Delta has started functioning at the Cai Cui seaport in Can Tho City.
Thailand is one of 22 high-TB-burden countries in the world, with a case detection rate of 72 per cent (2007 estimate) and a treatment success rate of 77 per cent. The Thai automobile industry will need 250,000 more workers in the next three years to meet the national target of 2 million units annually against 1.2 million in 2010. In Cambodia, tourism now ranks with the textile industry and agriculture as its top economic activities, but the hottest new sector is real estate. Some 35 per cent of Cambodia’s 14 million people live below the poverty line. The government has launched a five-year plan to fight corruption and attract foreign investment. One in five Filipino children never gets to primary school becaause of financial constraints, while three out of ten drop out before finishing elementary education.
Central Asia: In an ease-of-business survey of 183 countries, Kazakhstan ranks 58th and tops other Central Asian nations. That means it’s the most business-friendly country in the whole of Central Asia. Azerbaijan, one of the fastest growing economies in Central Asia, holds more than $20 billion in currency reserves and has committed to use that wealth to diversify the economy and improve infrastructure. More than 40 per cent of children in the Kyrgyz Republic are working, though the Kyrgyz constitution bans the use of child labour.
South Asia: Maternal deaths in Afghanistan are still the second highest in the world, though the rate has declined marginally from 1,600 per one lakh live births in 2001 to 1,400 this year. A third of Nepal’s 12 million children live below the poverty line and half of all children under five suffer from stunted growth due to chronic malnutrition. More than 4.5 million women in Nepal can’t read and write. About 77 million people in Pakistan go hungry due to rising prices of basic commodities. China will provide Pakistan with two nuclear power plants of 300 Mw each, adding to the existing Chinese-built nuclear power capacity in the country.
Some 43 per cent of Indian children are underweight, the highest level in the world and a figure that hasn’t changed in at least 20 years. In China, the figure is 7 per cent. As a whole, South Asia is the most malnourished region in the world with over 80 million suffering from malnutrition. Preventable diseases kill some 3.2 million children in India every year. Bangladesh has announced a plan to link all its 4,500 rural union councils by optical fibre by the end of 2012, to make high-speed Internet available to villagers. About a third of Dhaka’s 14 million people are considered “floating” or shanty and pavement dwellers.
Postscript: Nearly 60 per cent of software programs installed on personal computers around Asia in 2009 were unlicensed.
