Challenges To Realizing The Asian Century
Asia’s growth is not guaranteed. Its leaders will have to manage multiple risks and challenges, particularly:
- Growing inequality within countries, in which wealth and opportunities are confined to the upper echelons. This could undermine social cohesion and stability.
- Many Asian countries will not be able to make the necessary investments in infrastructure, education and government policies that would help them avoid the Middle Income Trap.
- Intense competition for finite natural resources, such as land, water, fuel or food, as newly affluent Asians aspire to higher standards of living.
- Global warming and climate change, which could threaten agricultural production, coastal populations, and numerous major urban areas.
- Rampant corruption, which plagues many Asian governments.
Read more about this topic: Asian Century
Famous quotes containing the words challenges, realizing, asian and/or century:
“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)
“Put your shoulder to the wheel.”
—Aesop (6th century B.C.)