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Since Japan has been
(and it's going on widely being) the regional development engine, its
involution could not affect the whole situation in south East Asia;
from Korea to Indonesia, from Thailand to Taiwan, from Singapore to
Philippines. These countries have been involved, having Bangkok as starting
point, in a kind of chain reaction, in the 1998 big financial crisis,
that at a certain point risked overwhelming the whole world.
At first, it seemed
that this crisis left behind itself a heap or ruins, and that the Tigers
would employ several years to get back on the right track. Instead the
cures, even at extra large dosis, have been administered them under
the direction of the International Monetary Fund, and achieving the
desired effect far most quickly than expected and the sizeable interested
countries have pick up again the virtual way of a more orderly growth
than formerly. Sure, not all the wounds closed: for example in South
Korea, the giant conglomerated that dominated economy are still in overdue.
The most worrying case,
nevertheless, is the Indonesia one, where the economic-financial crisis
coincided with the passage from a corrupt and authoritarian regime,
but enough efficacious of president Suharto to another, surely more
democratic but also quite weak. Also this case the IMF did not make
its aid lack, but the coincidence of the economic and the political
chaos, materialized not only in the frequent internal disorders, but
also in the separatist push of East Timor and the Aceh province and
in the religious conflicts that bloody the Molucca Islands, and that
surely did not contribute to settle things.
Since Indonesia is,
in population terms, the third country all over the world and that has
a hinge position between Asia and Australia, it spreads its own discomfort
all over the surrounding areas. To compensate in part the troubles of
the South-East, it got in the very last years of the century, a start
of awakening by India that, due to the long subjection to the SSRU and
the socialist mark of its economy played till now the role of the sleeping
beauty. Provided that the country has reached, just over last weeks,
the billion inhabitants, of which at least a third lives under the poverty
threshold, the way to go in order to reach the eastern neighbours is
really long.
But Indus discovered
unexpected abilities that could allowed them to go on their way up again:
as it results they are the most gifted population in informatics, and
they created at Bangalore a real Asiatic Silicon Valley and they turn
out every year ten thousand specialists, that beside contributing to
the modernization of the country, are very sought-after even by the
most advanced countries: the sole Germany would want to import 20.000
of them to put a remedy to its lack of skilled personnel, and benefiting
from the new opportunities given by Internet, an increase number of
western enterprises is planting in India their accounting centres.
But over the country
development it weights the already fifty years feud with the near Pakistan,
that leaded both countries to spend billion dollars in armies and to
equip themselves with nuclear weapons, turning the subcontinent into
one of the hot points of the planet. India, a federal state with far
as 15 official languages and 1600 dialects, boasts, rightly, to be the
greatest democracy all over the world, having kept unchanged the “ Westminster
system” left it in heritance by the English. Nevertheless, provided
the frequency of the political crisis and the endemic weakness of the
central government, many wonder about if this fact represents an advantage
or a handicap.
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