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Although capitalism is now widely seen to be the world's only remaining form of political economy, most discussion of capitalism is vague regarding what it is and gives it little analytical importance. In this paper, I attempt to determine whether two more explicit conceptions of capitalism– those of Ellen Meiksins Wood and Hernando de Soto– can shed any light on the literature on rural smallholder commodity production in the Asia Pacific, and vice versa. I use the papers collected in this volume to analyse the relevance of‘market dependence’ (Wood) and the various‘mysteries of capital’ (de Soto) for agrarian relations in the Asia Pacific. The paper tries to point towards a definition of capitalism that distinguishes it from such related terms as commercialisation, markets, and globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of spatial imaginaries and as physical infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spurs new geographies of comparative urban study. Irrespective of whether it is the primary driver for developments carried out in its name, 'the BRI' is a label that serves to bring previously unassociated project sites and non‐place‐based infrastructural developments into comparative relation. This paper considers some of the possibilities presented by the BRI for comparative urban studies in – and from – Asia. Building upon insights from postcolonial urban studies, planetary urbanisation and inter‐Asia cultural studies, I sketch two key possibilities of the BRI as (comparative urban) method. The first concerns the BRI as a series of openings to much (spatially) wider and historically deeper forms of comparison. Second, I argue that BRI as method impels forms of urban comparison beyond conventionally territorialised units of analysis at a variety of scales, including both the city and the (area studies) region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a practitioner perspective on community-based REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) projects in the Pacific Islands. It draws upon the author's experience in forest conservation financing since 1987, and REDD project and programme design, development and implementation since 2006. The aim is to highlight the commercial challenges faced by REDD practitioners, and explore strategic (including policy) solutions to meet these challenges. The paper begins by situating REDD as a tool for forest conservation and community development. Following a brief overview of the key elements of REDD project development procedures, the paper examines commercial (particularly market access) challenges faced by project proponents, together with challenges associated with the supply and demand dynamic for REDD credits in the global carbon market. This is situated against a backdrop of global policy stagnation in the REDD sector and the implications of this for those at the frontier of community-based forest protection efforts on the ground. The paper culminates by showing the importance of an effective partnership between governments, rainforest communities and the private sector in regional and global rainforest conservation financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue are the product of a comparative interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Natural Resources and Violent Ethnic Conflicts in the Asia Pacific Region’ held in Honolulu, Hawaii, 18–20 March 2005. The workshop brought together scholars who study conflicts between ethnic groups and those who study conflicts over natural resource claims in order to examine the interplay of resources and ethnicity and to seek answers to the question of why violence occurs in some cases and not in others. Both sets of scholars agreed on some points but disagreed on others. They agreed that ethnic and resource grievances occur not so much out of objective deprivation but out of ‘relative deprivation’ when groups compare their situation with others, to the past, or to future expectations. They both stressed the role of democratic processes in alleviating resource competition and ethnic conflicts – but they did this in different ways. The perspectives and solutions offered by these papers sum to a deeper and more contextualised understanding of the cause of conflict and to mutually reinforcing solutions for resolving them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explain how a number of leading electronics firms from Asian newly industrialised economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are articulated into global production networks and become major players in their respective market niches. Developing a triangular theoretical framework, I seek to explain the complex relationships between the dynamic articulation of these leading Asian electronics firms into different global production networks and their simultaneous upgrading from typical followers to market leaders. As a critique of the dominant developmental state discourse, I argue that the interplay between corporate strategies and home base advantages within the context of changing global production networks can offer a better explanation of the differentiated competitive outcomes of these Asian firms. This paper draws upon original data collected through personal interviews with top executives from leading electronics firms in the four Asian newly industrialised economies. I conclude the paper with some implications for theory and policy in relation to corporate development in Asian economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on managerial interview material from a multi-industry sample, this paper sketches the locational dynamics of regional functions in the Asia Pacific. Generic factors like proximity to company affiliates and market access are discussed, along with industry specific dynamics for air delivery and online information services. The paper ends with an analysis of the inertia created by agglomeration effects of established places versus the competing pulls of new markets and production sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea that in the Asia-Pacific region the relationship between economic growth, industrial transformation and the rise of service industries in general, and producer services in particular, appears to be different to that found in North America or Europe. After an exploration of the context for producer services growth, some simple indices for measuring the relative position of Asia-Pacific producer services in the global context are used to demonstrate that they are apparently less prominent than expected. More robust data, including case studies, are needed to substantiate this preliminary paper. The paper concludes with the elements of an agenda for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southeast Asia is a development success story. By 2025, it is forecast that extreme poverty in the region will have been ‘eradicated’. Does this mean that the challenges so evident in the 1960s when the countries of the region began to pursue development have been met, and the objectives achieved? The paper makes a case for thinking afresh about development and the poverty project, recognising that development is never neatly achieved but, rather, re‐worked, re‐engineered and re‐imagined over time. This is done through identifying different categories of ‘poor’, each produced through different poverty‐making processes, measured and viewed in different ways, and their poverty addressed using different approaches and policies. With specific reference to the cases of Laos and Thailand, and drawing on longitudinal research in the latter country, it is argued that while economic growth does trickle down, it trickles down in quite discrete and often contingent ways. Furthermore, there is always development work to be done, because development creates its own work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nation-building process of Timor-Leste, the newest nation in Asia, faces significant demographic challenges due to its high population growth, which is the fastest in Asia. The major contributor for this unprecedented growth is the extremely high total fertility rate of Timor-Leste, among the highest in the world. It is of great concern that if the current fertility rate and its implied population growth continue the population of Timor-Leste will double in 17 years. The analysis in this paper clearly shows that the current extremely high dependency ratio will decline only marginally in the next 10 years and this will put tremendous pressure on the government to constantly keep up with the increasing number of children entering school every year. However, as the intrinsic value of human resource development feeds back into the overall society and economy, an adequate public investment in knowledge-producing services at the earliest stages of life and throughout that life has the potential to change the demographic concern of Timor-Leste into a future demographic dividend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent dialogues in geography and the social sciences have reminded researchers of the extent to which academic and policy knowledges are socially and spatially embedded – that is, they circulate through formal and informal systems of publishing, exchange, commodification and cultural influence. Academic and policy knowledges are, in short, very much a part of the creative economy. In light of this, our paper surveys knowledges of the creative economy itself, as reflected in a geography of industry reports and government policy statements in selected Asian countries. Using a post-positivist framework adapted from diffusion theory, we critically interpret the circulation, mutation and adaptation of knowledges of the creative economy, claims to its significance, areas of emphases and notable silences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropes of borderlessness are pervasive both in discourses concerning the spread of HIV/AIDS and the Growth Triangle, a transnational economic zone that ideally binds together the Indonesian island of Batam, the Malaysian province of Johor and Singapore. This paper considers how the emergence of HIV as a problem in the Growth Triangle, and on Batam in particular, has been framed as a problem to be addressed in context of the nation-state rather than as a transnational problem that demands cooperation across borders. In conjunction with this, it focuses on further attempts to create boundaries around HIV, through the identification of risk groups, the localisation of prostitutes and the distribution of condoms. The paper focuses particular attention on the relationship between Batam and Singapore, and how non-governmental organisations and governments have dealt with HIV/AIDS issues in both places. Furthermore, it problematises these activities by paying ethnographic attention to other forms of cultural and economic logics that often are odds with prevention models. This raises important questions concerning, most specifically, the problems of HIV prevention and cross-border cooperation, and, more generally, the regulation and formation of new kinds of borders in a‘borderless world’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the work of NGOs broadens and becomes more complex, concerns about their capacity and sustainability will loom much larger and have more significant implications for development processes. The main issue addressed in this paper is how NGOs and donors variously view the relationship between capacity building and financial and organisational sustainability. To this end we firstly explore varying definitions of capacity building, highlighting distinctly Pacific perspectives of the concept and subsequently look at emerging practices used by Pacific NGOs to create sustainable organisations. The role of donor organisations in Pacific NGO capacity building is critiqued. We conclude that despite considerable rhetoric about the need for donors to adopt more coordinated approaches to capacity building, there is limited evidence to suggest that donors are prepared to act together to set up, for example, joint capacity building funds. Donors must accept that the long–term processes of development and the roles played by Non–Governmental and Community Based Organisations require a rethinking of the standard funding cycle and the focus on ‘exit strategies’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the relationship between the largest cities in East Asia and the comprehensive research universities that are located there. We look at three strands in this relationship. The first involves students and their perception of host cities, which provides a better understanding of student life and how this connects to the social-cultural environment of the city. The second strand examines the relationship between the university and industry, showing how such collaborations represent university products and knowledge spillovers that connect the university to the metropolitan economy. By examining where students plan to go after graduation, the third strand indicates that the city not only receives student migrants studying in metropolitan universities, it also receives graduates from other East Asian universities. Such third country choices (not returning home or staying in the host country) suggest a new after-study mobility and a small but growing pool of students who are likely to remain in East Asia's largest cities after graduation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several East Asian countries, with scarcely any crude oil, have developed since the second half of the twentieth century strong production capacities in refining and petrochemicals. This has been the case in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and China. This paper assesses whether the development of refining and petrochemical industries in these countries may be better understood with the aid of one of the major interpretative paradigms of structural change and foreign relations in East Asia: the Flying Geese Paradigm. The article concludes that, overall, the production and external relations in oil-related industries do indeed follow a Flying Geese Paradigm pattern. We observe, nevertheless, some dissonances that are attributable to the particularities of intermediate sectors (such as refining and basic petrochemistry). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Out of a total of 38 million people living with HIV/AIDS globally today, the Asia-Pacific is home to about 7.4 million– a figure which constitutes a sharp rise to previous years. In absolute numbers, infections in Asia are projected to exceed African figures within a decade. This has largely to do with economic changes towards market-based capitalism, widening socioeconomic disparities and increased levels of mobility (internal and cross-border), as for instance in China and Indonesia. Overall, the epidemic in Asia has been described as more complex than in Africa involving a multiplicity of transmission modes. The case studies presented in the contributions to this special issue discuss the connections between issues of mobility, gender, (trans)nationalism and sexuality in understanding the HIV/AIDS challenge in the region. The various ways in meeting the challenges of HIV/AIDS in Southeast and East Asia are analysed, whereby non-governmental and community-based responses often emerge as more effective than state interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Introduces a series of articles about the Asia-Pacific region. Analysis of the poetry of Pacific Island writers to create the environment for a more sensitive understanding of people, places, and processes in Oceania; Reconstruction of Maori land claims in the Taupo region; Discussion of the contributions of scholar R. Gerard Ward to Pacific island geography.

Introduces a series of articles on producer services in the Asia Pacific region. Nature of producer services; Corporate and institutional networks in the region.

Asia Pacific economies – particularly Japan, South Korea, China and Singapore – play a large and growing role in the commercial aircraft industry, despite the fact that the region has no major independent plane-maker. Instead, Asia has secured a significant position in the increasingly elaborate global production networks of Boeing and Airbus. The wider Asian significance in those networks has been fostered not only by the region's deep capital and human resource assets but also by the catalytic actions of developmental states in the region. Moreover, decades of rapid air traffic growth have made Asia a crucial market for Boeing and Airbus. In response, the American and European giants have been compelled to outsource more of their business to Asia in order to win sales and to design new airliners tailored to the needs of Asian customers. Together, the increased importance of Asia in both the design and the manufacture of commercial aircraft point to a future in which Asia will capture an ever-larger share of the value created in one of the world's most technologically sophisticated and strategically significant industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses various developments in the journal 'Asia Pacific Viewpoint,' since it's December 2002 issue. Naming of Warwick Murray as managing editor of the journal; Factors that led to change in title of the journal from 'Pacific Viewpoint' to the present one, during 1960s.

Book reviewed in this article: Winston Halapua, Living on the fringe: Melanesians of Fiji Patrick Fuery and Nick Mansfield, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory Keith Chambers and Anne Chambers, Unity of Heart. Culture and Change in a Polynesian Atoll Society Alice Aruhe’eta Pollard, Givers of Wisdom, Labourers without Gain: Essays on Women in Solomon Islands Prema–chandra Athukorala, Chris Manning and Piyasiri Wickramasekara, Growth, Employment and Migration in Southeast Asia: Structural Change in the Greater Mekong Countries Edvard Hviding and Tim Bayliss–Smith, Islands of Rainforest: Agroforestry, Logging and Eco–tourism in Solomon Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on population mobility in the Asia-Pacific region. Displacement from rural to urban areas.

An examination is made of the nature of corporate restructuring among liner shipping companies to meet the needs of producers for logistic services within the Asia-Pacific Economic Region. This task is undertaken by detailing the development of the global alliances forged in 1996. Then their impact on port selection and competition within the Asia-Pacific Economic Region is studied with particular reference to the Trans-Pacific trade. As the composition of these alliances has already changed by mergers their likely effect on port destinies is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 30 years international migration has been transformed from being of little or no significance in Asia to being of substantial economic, social, political and demographic importance. Two types of migration which have increased greatly in significance since the 1970s are international labour migration and refugee movements. Throughout most of the last two decades Asia has had more refugees than any other world region, although numbers have declined in the 1990s with the success of resettlement and repatriation programmes for Indochinese refugees. On the other hand, international labour migration has continued to increase in scale and importance, with the majority of workers moving between Asian countries in the 1990s, although the Middle East remains an important destination. It is argued that two elements, proliferating migrant social networks and the emergence of a vibrant immigration industry, have given a momentum to international migration which to some extent limits the power of nation states to control it. There is some concern among countries in the region that the increase in migration is creating excessive economic dependence upon the export of labour. Fears that migration threatens social cohesion depend upon the extent to which migrants settle permanently in destination areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rich body of orally transmitted texts kept alive by the people of the border country of Southwest China, both religious and secular provides a valuable source of information that has barely been tapped. The author believes that this time consuming task is well worth the effort. Even an exploratory review of selected parts of texts which focus on matters such as: how identity is constructed; what observations are made in the course of a journey to buy salt; general flora and fauna; and migration have more to tell us than is conveyed by the story. The possible rewards for those prepared to engage in textual analysis are likely to be considerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents publications received by the 'Asia Pacific Viewpoint' journal from January to December 2001. 'Island Kingdom--Tonga Ancient and Modern'; 'The South Pacific'; 'Tribes of the North Island Frontier; 'Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalism.'