The World Bank has projected 8% growth for India in 2010, which will make it the fastest-growing economy and overtaking China’s expected 7.7% growth. The growth rate for the Indian economy this year has been revised upwards to 5.1% from an earlier projection of 4%, according to World Bank’s Global Development Finance Report released on June 22.

Last week, China’s 2009 GDP growth rate was raised to 7.2% from World Bank’s earlier forecast of 6.5% due to the success of the government’s stimulus package. The bank’s forecast is lower than the Chinese government’s target of 8%.

The prospects for the global economy remain ‘unusually uncertain’ despite recent signs of improvement in some parts of the world, the report points out. Barring a few countries, including India and China, the bank has cut 2009 growth projections for all other economies and expects the world economy to contract by 2.9% this year.

“Developing countries are expected to grow by only 1.2% this year, after 8.1% growth in 2007 and 5.9% growth in 2008.

“When China and India are excluded, GDP in the remaining developing countries is projected to fall by 1.6%, causing continued job losses and throwing more people into poverty,” the report said.

The report calls on governments around the world to be vigilant when drawing up strategies to reverse the recent expansionary monetary and fiscal policies once the world economy takes off.

The bank has urged rich countries to boost the flow of credit to developing nations to help speed up economic recovery. “Developing countries can become a key driving force in the recovery, assuming their domestic investments rebound with international support, including a resumption in the flow of international credit,” said Justin Lin, chief economist at World Bank.

Despite the gloomy picture for this year, the bank says growth in developing countries, led by India and China, could reach 4.4% in 2010 and 5.7% by 2011.

Since global growth will only return to its full potential by 2011, the gap between actual and potential output, unemployment and disinflationary pressures continue to build, the report adds.

Source – Economic Times

IMF estimates that GDP in Emerging Asia excluding China and India fell at 15% annual rate in the 4th quarter of 2008. A sustained recovery will need to await an improvement in the global economy – which the IMF did not expect before the middle of 2010. IMF projects growth in developing Asia to slow at 4.8 percent, but this is well above other regions. The IMF forecasts that Asian growth will decelerate to 1.3% in 2009 before rebounding to 4.3% in 2010, still well below potential and the 5.1% rate recorded in 2008.

Source – IMF Regional Economic Outlook : Asia and Pacific, May 2009

India’s economy registered better than expected strong growth of 5.8% in the three months to 31 March 2009, boosted by hefty government spending. The last fiscal quarterly growth rate is the lowest in four years but beating analyst forecasts of 5.2% annual expansion. India, Asia’s third largest economy, expanded by 6.7% in the year to March 2009, lower than the 9% posted a year earlier.

The Chinese economy grew 9% in 2008. China’s GDP growth rate slowed to 6.1% to reach 6.5745 trillion yuan (US$939 billion) in the first quarter of this year, the weakest in 10 years, which was entirely generated by domestic demand. Investment and consumption drove up China’s GDP growth by 6.3% in the first quarter of this year by a rough estimate while external demand dragged GDP growth down 0.2%, according to the Chinese National Statistics Bureau (NBS).

Auto sales in China hit 2.68 million units in the first quarter – the highest in the world. Its saving rate rose to 49.9% in 2007 from 37.5% around 1998, compared with 4.2% in the United States in February this year.

China’s prosperous coastal provinces are bearing the brunt of the global financial fallout as reflected by their disappointing growth rates in 1Q of this year, with the GDP of former economic powerhouses Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong falling below the national average of 6.1%.

Main Chinese Provinces’ GDP, First quarter 2009

Source – ChinaDaily

Asia’s consumers are expected to use their relatively high savings to buy the world’s growth in the coming decade as those in North America and continental Europe turn their attention away from the cash registers and toward their piggy banks.

In a report by CIBC World Markets, economists Avery Shenfeld and Benjamin Tal said consumer spending in the United States, Canada and Europe is expected to contract by about $600-billion a year over the next decade as the population begins to build up their savings after being whacked by the financial crisis. The phenomenon will be particularly evident in the United States where the steep drop in house prices has shocked the American public into deleveraging.

But this period of deleveraging is not expected to doom North American economies, with exports expected to play a larger role in economic growth. These exports are expected to feed an anticipated appetite for consumer goods in the emerging markets, notably China, which in turn will drive equity markets and resource prices higher and the Canadian dollar back above parity with the greenback.

CIBC expects Asia’s growing middle class to whittle down their traditionally high savings rate in the coming years, leaving more money to spend on consumer goods. This process is expected to cut five percentage points off the savings rate in the emerging market, taking it to just below 30%, and adding about $900-billion to global consumer spending a year.

There is some indication that this has already started to occur. Sales of domestically made vehicles in China set a record high of 1.153 million units in April, up 25% from a year earlier, figures from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed earlier this month.

“The middle class, especially in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries, will be the new engine of world economy,” said Alex Tarver, product specialist at Halbis Capital Management, a subsidiary of HSBC in London. “It is the middle class that are eager to buy their first cars and mobile phones. This is in contrast to the current middle class of the developed world.”

Mr. Tarver said the BRIC economies, which are projected to account for 40% of the world’s population by 2020, should be closer in size to the Group of Seven developed nations by the end of the next decade.

“The strengthening of emerging countries as economic powers and policies in an increasingly multi-polar world will mean that Brazil, Russia, India and China will be key pieces of the global economic order,” he said.

However, some economists, such as Derek Holt at Scotia Capital see challenges ahead for emerging market consumers.

“High saving nations will likely remain so, and when combined with fewer investment alternatives and less issuance from other sectors the results are relative insulating factors for sovereign debt flows,” Mr. Holt said. “China is doing little to encourage lower domestic saving and is instead reallocating foreign exchange reserves through its banking system to feed tomorrow’s impaired loans.” Source – Financial Post

The complete CIBC World Markets report is available at:
http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/occrept67.pdf.

‘Silent Mentors’ Spark a Surge of Cadavers in Taiwan

Medical schools around the world have ceremonies to honor donors but Tzu Chi (last year the NGO channeled more than $300 million in private donations to victims of natural disasters around the world) is taking the practice to unusual levels – an elaborate farewell for 8 people who had donated their bodies to Tzu Chi University’s medical school for use in a surgery-simulation class.

By the time students here wield their scalpels, they will know the dead intimately, composing poems and slide shows to them, writing their biographies and sometimes lighting incense in their honor. When they are finished, the students will carry the donors’ coffins to the crematory, mourning them as their “silent mentors” who taught them with their bodies.

The cadaver program is aimed at changing how traditional Chinese society in Taiwan and China views the human body — and in the process, end a body deficit plaguing Taiwanese medical schools. Traditionally, Chinese view their bodies as a bequeathal from their ancestors. This means bodies mustn’t be damaged before burial. At Tzu Chi, therefore, Venerable Cheng Yen insists that — unlike in Western medical schools — cadavers be sutured after being cut up. The laborious process takes days, but in the end the body is whole.

Ven. Cheng makes a more profound pitch to potential donors: Society needs you.

It is an argument that has deeply touched Taiwanese, whose economic miracle of the past decades has left some morally unmoored. More than 23,500 Taiwanese have willed their bodies to Tzu Chi, allowing the hospital to satisfy its educational needs and supply other schools on the island. Following Tzu Chi’s lead, other schools have implemented similar commemorative services, eliminating the shortage of corpses that long hindered the Taiwanese medical establishment.

“The public was conservative about corpse donation, but Tzu Chi has made the public more open-minded,” says Lu Ko-shian, director of the National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology. “Tzu Chi changed that mindset with the power of religion.”

At first, medical professionals also viewed the efforts skeptically. Tseng Guo-fang was one of them. Formerly head of anatomy at National Taiwan University’s medical school, Mr. Tseng didn’t see the point in the elaborate efforts to treat the bodies with so much respect. But after agreeing to teach courses at Tzu Chi, he came to appreciate it and eventually took a senior posting at the school.

“I was trained as a hard-core scientist and this didn’t make sense to me,” says Mr. Tseng. ” But I began to see that there’s more to teaching a student than just technical ability; we need to create compassionate doctors too.” The efforts are spreading to China, where hospitals are also chronically short of corpses. Nine of the students in the February workshop in Hualien were from Shanghai. Western observers have been likewise impressed.

“It’s something that we can learn from,” said Sylvia Cruess, former director of medical services at McGill University in Montreal, who recently witnessed one of the Tzu Chi ceremonies.

The farewell ritual begins anew each summer before classes begin, when students like Mr. Hsu fan out from Hualien, a small city on the rocky coast of eastern Taiwan, to visit the donors’ families. After a two-hour ride, Mr. Hsu and two classmates arrived at the home of Li Syu Yue-E, a 62-year-old who died of septic shock brought on by diabetes. Ms. Li Syu had asked that her body be donated to Tzu Chi, which froze it for use in a surgery simulation class.

“You want the family to understand what we’re doing so they feel part of it,” Mr. Hsu said. “We also learned about Teacher Li Syu. We got to know her as a person.” In late February, Mrs. Li Syu’s body was unfrozen along with the other seven bodies to be used in a surgery simulation, one of four such workshops the school holds every year.

The night before the workshop was to start, some of the school’s 350 medical students gave PowerPoint presentations about the lives of each donor to school staff and family members. When Mr. Hsu’s group was up, a classmate showed pictures of Mrs. Li Syu, accompanied by a poem written by the classmates:

Like a warm lantern in our heart,
Like the supple light of the moon,
To embrace you forever
In the fragrance of a flower,
We will remember you forever

Then, Jeff Sun, head of the Tzu Chi hospital’s surgery department, addressed the relatives. “The students are right next to you. They know how dear the departed are to you. They will treat them with respect.”

The next day at dawn, Mr. Hsu stood, clad in a white uniform and surrounded by classmates, in a small, bright shrine on the university campus. Across the aisle were about 30 family members of eight donors. After a short service of Buddhist prayers, the two sides filed into the operating room. On a screen at the head of each of the eight operating tables was a photo of the deceased.

Slowly, family members broke down. Some prostrated themselves over the bodies, wailing. Others stood silently sobbing. Like many of the other medical students, Mr. Hsu’s face began to turn red. He bit his lip as it started to quiver. His eyes welled up with tears. Across the table from him, Ms. Li Syu’s daughter, Syu Yue-chen, looked at him appreciatively before everyone trooped out and the service concluded with more prayers. As family members headed home, Mr. Hsu and his classmates went back in to begin their work.

Four days later, the surgery workshop ended, and all reunited for the final funeral. The bodies were taken to a crematorium and the remains put in cut-glass urns donated to Tzu Chi by one of the island’s most popular craftsmen, Heinrich Wang.

“This was her will, to let the students learn from her body,” said Ms. Syu as she prepared to make her way back home to Hong Kong. “And maybe now I can accept it.”

Source – WSJ

For 25 years, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) has been Singapore’s most important civil society campaigner for gender equality. AWARE’s executive committee was recently hijacked by female members from Singapore’s far-right Church of Our Saviour, that is openly anti-gay and pro-family.. (IPS News)

Advocacy by AWARE led to revisions of the penal code, including issues of marital rape (2007), the constitutional amendment to accord the same citizenship rights to children of Singaporean women as for Singaporean men (2004), and the right of women to sponsor foreign husbands for citizenship (1999). AWARE runs a phone helpline, legal clinic, counselling services including a “befrienders” service which provides support to women in need by accompanying them to police stations, family courts and other help centres. But gender equality may not be at the centre of its vision for much longer.

At the annual general meeting (AGM) end-March, the old guard, which has spearheaded its advocacy work, was voted out by a new group of women who have joined the association in the previous 3 months. Some 80 of the 120 members present at the meeting were all new members. Six of the 11 members of the management committee of AWARE, including the president, vice-president, secretary, assistant secretary and treasurer, are new members – all Chinese Singaporean professionals and belonging to the same evangelical church.

“There were many faces I have not seen before, and I found that very strange,” recalls Dana Lam, a former president. “In the past, if there were new members, they would be known to one or more of the older members.”

Says Braema Mathi, a two-time president of AWARE and currently a consultant with the UN women’s agency, UNIFEM, “If you are keen to serve you don’t challenge every position. We do not know who they are!”

After refusing to speak to the media for almost two weeks about their intentions, the new management held a press conference on Apr. 23 at which a leading lawyer Dr Thio Su Mien, who is a former dean of the Law Faculty at the National University of Singapore, said she was the brain behind the take over of AWARE.

Dr Thio, who is 71 years old and a self confessed “born-again Christian”, told reporters she was disturbed by what she saw as signs of AWARE promoting lesbianism and homosexuality, and so, in the past year, she has been urging women she knew to join the group, and challenge AWARE’s attempts to redefine marriage and family.

Singapore is multicultural. “Twenty-four years of serious work may now be threatened by a group of women whose religious affiliation may lead to an exclusionary AWARE,” laments Hafizah Osman, an AWARE member, in a letter to the Straits Times daily. “It is sad that veteran members now have to fight against possible marginalisation of women by women.”

On Apr. 24, the veterans held a press conference to counter claims that AWARE was promoting lesbianism.

Founder member Dr Kanwaljit Soin clarified that homosexuality education was only a small part of what they did. “AWARE cannot be an ostrich which buries its head and pretends homosexuality does not exist,” she said. “There are many anguished young people who are bothered by it (their different sexual orientation).” “(Because) AWARE’s founding principle has been inclusive, we cannot condemn, deny or exclude any woman because of her sexual orientation or because she has been abused by her husband or because she is a single mother,” according to Dr Soin.

Some 160 members of AWARE have called for an extraordinary general meeting on May 2 to discuss the implications of the change of guard at AWARE. Many people have joined internet chat lines and newspapers are flooded with letters to the editor questioning the nature of “reforms” promised by the new members.

One such reader, Ravi Gopalan, in a letter to the Strait Times seeks clarification that AWARE will be open to people of all religions. “What are the checks and balances, for instance, to ensure that women who are at a low and vulnerable point in their lives, and who turn to AWARE for help, are not turned towards religious rather than practical answers?”

He argued that troubled and abused women who go to AWARE for help “should not have to be targets of proselytisation in order to receive the secular aid they need.” Says veteran journalist B.N. Balji: “Let there be a clash of ideas and let the members decide what they want … Whether in politics or activism, it is the kind of maturity that Singapore needs.”

Latest: Congratulations to the old guard & for all women!!

- Motion to remove new AWARE exco from office and elect new president has been passed. Ms Josie Lau and her exco have stepped down. Former President Dana Lam has been elected President.

Channel NewsAsia – Part 1

Channel NewsAsia Part 2