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Essay on Asia Culture, Geography & Politics To Understand Asian Economies Today
The region known as Asia has a total population well in excess of three billion people; its peoples speak several hundred different languages and dialects; and it is characterized by a cultural, political, economic and social diversity far greater than anywhere else in the world. Contemporary Asia cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a homogeneous entity and yet there is a notion, largely promulgated in the media, that globalization is reducing the world to a single homogeneous culture.
In fact, globalization has prompted people worldwide to take more notice of other cultures and aspects of cultural difference, especially with regard to Asia. This can largely be attributed to the rise in power and importance of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia as regional trading and economic blocs. The growth in Asian economic importance in the early 1990s, and the birth of the notion of 'Asian tiger' economies produced a great deal of 'soul searching' in the west.
How could Asia have 'overtaken' traditional economic giants such as the US and the European Union? The answers that came from some parts of Asia itself, particularly Singapore and Malaysia, focused on supposedly 'traditional Asian values' such as a more committed work ethic, the importance of communitarian values (that position the community over the individual), the integration of public and private enterprises, strong central leadership, and a well-resourced education and training sector. (Sugata Bose, Ayesha Jalal, 2001, page 21.)
This changed, to a certain extent, with the advent of the so called Asian economic crises. The first signs of the crisis can be traced back to early 1997, when a number of South Korean and Thai businesses defaulted on their debts. The so-called 'contagion' quickly spread to other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and even Japan. A number of reasons were put forward to explain how and why a group....
