Page 26 - Asia Speaks

1A2) URBAN RESILIENCE by Siew Sook Yan
re the poorer regions in Asia and larger. This high level of regional catching up with the richer inequality can easily translate into an regions? Are the gaps between upcoming regional dispute! Studies
But in fact, how unequal these regions are? And by how much do they differ? At which level of difference are conflicts more prone to happen? There is a serious lack of extensive research on the Asian region.
On another light, the emerging young Asians hold more extensive knowledge in Economics, Mathematics and Computer Sciences than their forefathers. Hence, it is believed that the coming generation can do better to bulletproof the Asian region from ‘randomised’ shocks. Pairing with historical evidence, the youths now have more modern measures to fill in the information gap in understanding regional differences. Such as retrieving data of lights from satellites as a unified estimated indicator of GDP across the Asian region. Furthermore, lights proved itself useful in estimating income and population, on the micro- scale even.
There is a saying that goes like “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure”. Adequate policies deriving from the findings of the creative future talents, is definitely in the light of keeping our urban space resilient from predictable stresses, ensuring a sound environment for sustainable growth!
them closing up? The lack of consistent and reliable data across the Asian region due to its high heterogeneity has long been a problem for measuring and comparing their income differences. For example, the statistic bureau in Indonesia might like to compute their regional household output base on their food expenditure, while the Malaysian one takes account other attributes such as the households’ transportation and housing consumption. And then there are some countries such as Cambodia and Laos that do not have any available data at all. That’s why there are cross- region institutions such as, World Bank that comes in to unify the computing methodology, but their up-to-date record is not always released to the public for individual research.
Why is it important for us to measure the relative growth of regions, you might ask? Simple. It is to understand what is happening across regions. Without any measurements, we cannot compare, so we will not know what is going on, and hence we will lose the chance to try and improve whatever the current situation is. What if the level of income happens to be diverging? As in the gap between the poorer regions and the richer regions growing larger
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show that regions that are fairly equal in income or demographic measures are particularly resilient to possible conflicts.
In the parable, the Indonesians feel sorrow for the loss of their Timorese brother, and they do not understand why does he want to leave their family so much. While the persistent underrepresentation and unequal treatment East Timor receive, pairing with the concentration of 99% Catholics compared to the Muslims majority across the other Indonesian region, the arm-conflict 20 years ago was not so surprising after all. Similarly, the separation of Malaysia and Singapore arising from the unequal distribution of ethnicity; and the case of Bangladesh and Pakistan from differing ideology and income.
These strong disagreements, with one of the ultimate causes being regional inequality, could have been prevented or at least predicted if we had the measures to do so. On the light of the South Asian region, we only understood how demographically segregated they are by culture and our religion, now that there is an escalation of arm conflict.