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Comments on an article about technology diffusion. Concept of technology diffusion; Political and economic relevance of technology; Perspective on Asian agricultural development.

This article focuses on the comparative content analysis of the Arabic press. The purpose of this analysis was to determine the extent to which the reading publics in various Arab countries are being exposed to news of international events. Secondly, the kind of information the press is transmitting and the relative attention it is paying to events involving different countries of Europe, Asia and Africa. Lastly, the favorable or unfavorable images of these other countries that this information is likely to convey to the readers. The content analysis was carried out in two phases. The first concerned the content of the entire newspaper. In this phase, printed space was measured and multiplied by the average number of pages per issue to obtain base totals for each prestige paper. The second phase of the analysis was confined to the first page only. Items appearing on this page were classified in greater detail. In the study it was found that, despite the small size of many Arabic newspapers, papers, internationally significant news, as opposed to news of local or regional reference, absorbs a surprisingly high percentage of total space. Objective changes in the world power situation and in the nature of Arab-Western interaction have not succeeded in suppressing the Arab's preoccupation with external affairs.

In the postwar years numerous controversies have raged over the adequacy of the levels of food consumption in underdeveloped areas. Usually, the food issue appears to be discussed from the standpoint of health; in this paper, we ask whether food consumption is adequate for work purposes, as distinct from problems of health. In brief, our answer is that for the majority of working Asians, food intake is probably less than optimal from the economic viewpoint. In the concluding sections, the implications for economic development analysis are delineated. The first portions of the paper will evaluate the various qualitative findings of food consumption and concepts of requirements, after which a hypothesis designed to interpret the data will be presented. The discussion will focus on calorie intake which largely determines the output of energy in human physiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates various papers focusing on social development in Asia. Land reforms and agrarian change in India; Examination of professional profiles and employment problems in selected countries; Analysis of the political sociology of the process of economic development; Agrarian framework for development.

A conference paper about the Asian influence in Europe is presented. It talks about the Tartar influence in European Russia. The author discusses his travels through Russia and the crossing of the Caucasus Mountains into Europe. Subjects of the paper also include tribes of Jews in the mountains, the Armenian Plain, and Tartar mill-work.

Using an ecological perspective, one aspect of the relationship of social distance and physical distance is analyzed in the three largest cities in Israel. The principal aim of the paper is to examine ethnic (country of origin) residential segregation as an indicator of social patterning within the society. Despite the different demographic, topographical and functional characteristics of the three cities, fairly similar patterns of ethnic segregation are found using the technique of Smallest Space Analysis (SSA-I) to analyze index of dissimilarity matrices. Patterns of ethnic segregation are then related to the SES of sub-quarters to determine the nature of the internal structure of the cities. It is suggested that ethnicity is an important variable in the process of social stratification in urban Israel, at least insofar as ecological relationships are concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on nationalism in United States. There are scores of new States in Asia and Africa that are trying to set up free societies. It is a "new birth of freedom" on a grand scale. It is in fact freedom's greatest test, for it involves the older free regimes of Europe and the United States. If truth counts over charity, then one must point out that the new States will fail, if not all, then all but a few. Some are already succumbing to the initial perils of liberty that the last paper of the Federalist warned Americans against: "anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagogue." The real wonder is in believing that national unity could ever arise in freedom among the many units that nowadays arrogate to themselves the name of nation. They are nations only to the map maker. Many are areas marked off only for colonial administrative convenience; some have dozens, even hundreds, of languages, several antagonistic religions; a still uncounted welter of tribes living in mutual ignorance or traditional war; and above all there stands the great gulf between the village primitive and the urban modern.

The purpose of this research paper is to enlarge the dimension of agrarian reform programs by considering them as a part of the community development role in agrarian improvement and economic development in general. The author's hypothesis shall be that community development programs are a necessary condition for economic development. Implicit in the author's discussion is the thought that community development programs can extend beyond traditional supporting services such as credit availability, technical advice and marketing co-operatives. In some countries, extensive agricultural support programs may, however, qualify for "full-blown" community development status. The contention is that for agrarian reform to make significant economic contributions, major support activities are required. After surveying rural agriculture in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, the author concluded that one institution appeared to stand above all others as a requisite for the existence of a strong agricultural sector and that is viable farmer associations.

This paper discusses the problems of industrial development in Asian countries which show high densities of rural population and contrasts their probable pattern of industrialization with that of economically more highly advanced European countries. When an approximately equal proportion of the population of western European countries was dependent upon primary production, as is the case now in agriculture in most Asian countries, agricultural densities were only roughly a fourth as great as in Asia to-day. Yet in western Europe despite emigration of "surplus" labour and relatively large capital supplies, industrialization proceeded only fast enough to skim off the net addition to population in primary production. In Asia population press tire is higher than in Europe in the past arid capital is scarcer. Hence it is not probable that industrialization will proceed to the same degree arid in the same form as in. Europe. In place of generally large-scale production, many small and cottage industries are likely to develop These have lower productivity and hence lower wages than large industry, and the persistence of small-scale industry will impose the need to maintain separate labour markets for large and small industry. The maintenance of existing harriers or the introduction of new impediments to social mobility can be expected to provide a mechanism for an imperfectly "universalist" labour market in Asian countries and the continued existence of non-competing groups ha the industrial labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the rank-dimensional approach to the analysis of social stratification has become increasingly prominent. One of its advocates, Johan Galtung, has made relations between nations his major point of empirical reference. The present paper applies rank-dimensional analysis to the deprived nations of Africa and Asia (or the so-called Third World) in an attempt to grasp the degree of rank homogeneity within the group and to relate its rank characteristics to the more privileged nations in the global system. This exercise demonstrates that there is a linear relationship between total rank and rank disequilibrium in the Afro-Asian group; a finding which has a number of significant theoretical ramifications. The major theoretical innovation in this connexion is the concept of rank divergence-defined as the degree to which a unit in a system of stratification diverges from the typical relational pattern holding between the unit's total rank and rank disequilibrium scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies by Adelman and by Friedlander and Silver, which have investigated whether regression equations derived from cross-section data can be used to predict the impact of socioeconomic development on changing levels of fertility, are reviewed critically. Regression analyses based on data for 57 countries c. 1960 show that fertility (gross reproduction rate) varies cross-sectionally with region as well as with level of development (as measured by per capita income, percent labor force in primary sector, expectation of life, illiteracy rate). Using equations derived from the cross-section study and time-series data for five European countries during the period that their fertility rates fell, it is shown that predictions about past fertility changes are in error. The results suggest caution in the use of cross-section relations to predict the course of fertility in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents abstracts of several papers about economics published in the March 1965 issue of the South African Journal of Economics. In the article Some Methodological Aspects of South Africa's First Economic Development Programme, M. Van Den Berg outlined the methods used to calculate basic economic figures and presented the background to the choice of the numerical value of the incremental capital-output ratio for the purposes of calculating the basic figures. While the article Some Non-Economic Determinants of the Economic Status of Asians in Africa, dealt with persons of Indo-Pakistani and Goan descents who were spread throughout East, Central and Southern Africa. Two determinants were considered, the Asian's religious beliefs and the legal and social color bar against Asians.

Presents information related to several abstracts on economics published in the November 1962 issue of the journal 'The Review of Economics and Statistics.' U.S. demand for imports from 1948-58; Wage differentials and specification bias in estimates of relative labor prices; Soviet national income accounts for 1955; International comparison of size distributions of income with special reference to Asia.

Attempts to systematically analyze the export commodity pattern of the developing Asian countries with the developed countries (DC). Definitions of the countries considered and the commodity groups, time periods, and data used; Growth rate of developing Asia's exports to the DC; Total imports of the DC; Export share of less developed regions and developed regions in 1953 and 1963.

The objective of this paper is to examine empirically the sources of variation in export growth of individual developing countries of Asia, the region whose export expansion has been especially sluggish along with Latin America (see Appendix Table 1 for export shares of different LDC regions). The analysis is divided into two parts: exports of Asian countries to DCs and intra-regional exports of these countries. The method, source of data, and definition are given first below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts a comparative evaluation of some of the determinants of aggregate personal savings in Asia. Its distinguishing characteristic is that it is the first attempt, as far as we know, to investigate the determinants of savings by pooling a group of less developed nations. It combines both temporal analysis of individual Asian nations and intertemporal cross-section analysis of a large group of Asian nations. The research reported here extends a tradition of international comparative analysis initiated some years ago by Houthakber[1] who attempted to make better use of intertemporal cross-sections for hypothesis testing. The present article also builds on a recent contribution by Friend and Taubman[2] which captured transitory and permanent income effects on savings by utilizing global intertemporal cross-sections. The following pages explore a number of hypotheses regarding savings behaviour which seem particularly applicable to the developing economies in the Asian region. These hypotheses include an investigation of the influence on aggregate personal savings of prices and price expectations, permanent and transitory income, real rates of interest, and the functional distribution of income. Section 2 develops our hypotheses in some detail. The data inputs are discussed in Section 3. Section 4 presents the empirical results, which are then followed by some concluding remarks in Section 5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on a study which examined the determinants of entrepreneurship in Asia. Information on the factor analysis; Results of the study; Implications of the results.

This article attempts to explain cross-cultural variations in age at marriage and proportions never marrying. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework in which the causes of current variations in the timing and quantity of nuptiality are explored. Although timing and quantity tend to be related, each is an analytically distinct component of the marriage pattern and each contributes independently to variations in birth rates. Sometimes treated as independent variables or as determinants of other processes, they are in this analysis treated as dependent variables, themselves in need of explanation. Five geographical regions are included in the analysis: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the English-speaking nations overseas, the Middle East, and Asia. The original intention was to include all countries in the world with populations over 100,000 hut the countries included in the final analysis cover only half the population of the world in 1960. The U.S.S.R., China and other socialist Asian countries are excluded because of lack of data. The Caribbean, Central America and South America are excluded because of difficulties in interpreting available data due to the high incidence of consensual unions.

The article discusses the difficulties that Asian countries encounter in their process of economic development. The author gives a comparison between the economic development of the U.S. and India. He notes that Americans started under conditions of extreme abundance of natural resources relative to population while the Indians started under conditions of extreme population relative to natural resources. Several factors are presented that affect the economic difficulties of Asian countries which include the underestimation of natural resources, change in demographic structure, and rapid population.

Gourd from three localities in New guinea are more similar to those of America and Africa (Lagenaria siceraria subsp. siceraria) than to gourds of Asia and the Pacific region (Lagenaria siceraria subsp. asiatica). Such gourds could have arrived in New Guinea by ocean currents from America or Africa, or they could have been introduced by man. Gourd are used as penis sheaths in New Guinea, South America, and Africa. If contacts between New Guinea and South America and Africa occurred in the pre-Columbian period, the gourds, along with their use as penis sheaths, may have been introduced from America or Africa to New Guinea, but no decision can be reached as to how and when these gourds arrived in New Guinea and their use as a phallocrypt was acquired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the study "Versuch einer Uebersicht der siphonogamen Polsterpflanzen," by H. Hauri and C. Schröter published in the 1914 issue of "Engler's Botanische Jahrbuch." In this article, a list of the known phanerogamic cushion plants and their general characteristics are presented. An analysis of the plants' geographical distribution revealed that half of the species grow in South America and New Zealand. In Europe and Asia, these plants are confined to the mountains.