Narrow Results

We employ an asset pricing framework with varying estimation lengths to show that there has been an increasing degree of integration between Asian and international stock markets, but very little with Japan. This finding is consistent with prior studies and highlights the impact of recent regulatory and economic reform undertaken throughout the region. Our results show that instability in the asset variance structure underpins the observed varying degrees of financial market integration. In particular, modeling integration using shorter estimation periods helps explain the time varying nature of financial market integration and the benefits that may accrue to international and domestic investors.

This study empirically examined unemployment dynamics in 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, namely, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand. It used quarterly data on the unemployment rates from the first quarter of 1980 to the first quarter of 2013. This paper employed three different econometric methods, including the recently-developed powerful unit root test with structural break (Lee and Strazicich, 2003, 2004) and the nonlinear unit root test (Enders and Lee, 2012). The findings indicated that the unemployment rates in five countries of the region, namely, China, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, had highly dynamic labor markets in which higher-than-normal unemployment rates would revert to the normal level. The other seven Asia-Pacific countries had less dynamic labor markets. The findings of this study have some important policy implications.

Biota Discovers New Potent Antivirals.

Celladon Partners with V-Kardia on Development of Percutaneous Delivery of Gene Therapy for Heart Failure.

Regenera Closes Multimillion Dollar Drug Deal.

Napo Pharma Collaborates with AsiaPharm.

Matrix Buys Over Belgian Company Docpharma.

Ranbaxy Buys Portfolio from Spain's EFARMES.

Japan's MediBIC and ReaMetrix India Team up.

Medical & Biological Labs and DNAVEC Establish Joint Venture Company in China.

Britsol-Meyers Squibb Collaborates with Korea's Celltrion.

YM Biosciences Partners with Kuhnil to Develop Nimotuzumab.

A Company that Helps Translate Basic Research into Useful Biomedical Products.

InfleXion Corp Develops Diagnostic Kits.

GNI and Shanghai Genomics Merge.

MerLion Announces Collaboration Agreement with Sankyo.

Schering AG Sets Up Asia-Pacific Headquarters in Singapore.

Three Global Companies Invest US$112 Million to Form Joint Venture: Interpharma, Quintiles and Temasek Holdings

Tendon & Ligament Tissue Engineering: How to do it and how to know you've done it right?

Realizing the Promise of Asia-Pacific: The Strategic Shift from Outsourcing to Innovation.

FEI: Opening Worlds Within Our World.

Bone Healing from Within

How Technology Helps in Care Coordination: Telehealth?

Soft Wearable Machines for Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation

Technology Can Help Patients Find Doctors and Share Medical Data

Seizing Opportunity in Asia-Pacific's Complex and Rapidly Changing Medical Device Market

How Logistics Technology Can Treat Tomorrow's Life Sciences & Healthcare Complications

Asia-Pacific’s Invisible Malaria Problem.

Philips Launches Health Continuum Space to Enable Co-Creation of Future Healthcare Innovations.

How to make value-based care a reality?

Impactful interventions to maximise healthspan.

Viral hepatitis in Arkhangai: How Asia’s first micro-treatment program’s successes can be leveraged to treat a “silent killer”.

The long-suffering challenge of vaccination.

Asia-Pacific: Falling behind in the fight against HIV/AIDS

The proliferation of global trade and commerce provides both challenges and opportunities for addressing transboundary pollution and furthering global sustainability. In addition to international policy instruments and legislation, standardised approaches to environmental management can improve environmental performance and reduce the escalating levels of pollution that are being experienced worldwide, and particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

In Hong Kong, 35 organisations have been certified to the ISO 14001 international environmental management system (EMS) standard, joining over 5000 more worldwide. While this trend is encouraging, Hong Kong's experience demonstrates that significant barriers exist for EMS to become a mainstream tool for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

As is it unlikely that certification will become mandatory at the international level, additional effort is therefore required to overcome these barriers, such as raising the awareness of all stakeholders to the benefits of the EMS and facilitating access to the necessary financial and technological assistance.

In this paper, we compare welfare effects and the extent of sectoral adjustments of the member countries under alternative free trade agreement (FTA) sequencings in the Asia-Pacific region using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. If a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement under one sequencing and an East Asian FTA (EAFTA) under another sequencing will enter into force at the same time, followed by more enlarged FTAs, then a larger number of countries are expected to realize greater welfare gains under the Asia-track sequencing. However, given the uncertainty about the establishment of an Asia-wide FTA in the near future, the TPP-track sequencing appears to be an attractive option for most countries in the Asia-Pacific region. With respect to sectoral adjustments, there seem to be no significant differences among the alternative sequencings considered in this study.

Of all the major activities and initiatives by the fifth-generation Chinese leadership, formally inaugurated in 2012, those relating to the Asia-Pacific region are the most noteworthy. The past two years witnessed the Chinese leadership enunciating a "Chinese Dream" vision for the nation and offering to share the prospects of prosperity and stability with the entire Asia-Pacific region and beyond. The leadership also adopted a "new normal" mode, aimed at stabilizing domestic economic growth and improving its quality. By way of establishing and expanding free trade zones, China demonstrates its commitment to liberalization. The spate of free trade agreements concluded with U.S. security allies, in addition to a commitment to expedite conclusion of a bilateral investment treaty with the U.S., points to China's separation of rules-based trade/investment management from concerns about geostrategic denial. Chinese initiation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and integration with economies along a "Silk Road Economic Belt" and a "Twenty-first-Century Maritime Silk Road" are bold yet challenging. At the same time, other Chinese economic diplomacy initiatives have yet to win broad-based support. Nevertheless, in its totality, China is not seeking to rewrite established rules of world economic governance.

Facing increasing challenges to regional peace and stability, yet feeling isolated in several key security mechanisms in the Asia-Pacific, China has been taking active measures to improve its security environment and to foster a new regional security architecture based on the “New Asian Security Concept,” in order to achieve a lasting and commonly beneficial collective security order in the region. Though no official blueprint has been established by the Chinese government, one can expect China to push forward an all-inclusive and comprehensive platform as the core of the new architecture which features collective security driven by major powers based on their consulted consensus. Yet China will not seek to build a completely new Asia-Pacific security architecture to replace the old one. Instead, it is taking a pragmatic and incremental approach to shape the necessary environment for the evolution of the old architecture into a more inclusive and balanced one. If Sino-U.S. relations can be well managed and China continues to project its growing power in a refrained and contributive way to provide more public goods for regional peace and development, then it is hopeful that a new regional security architecture will take shape in the coming decades.

Background: Fertility physicians are gatekeepers of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and have immediate control over access to fertility care. However, little is understood about their attitudes and willingness to provide and support different procedures. Therefore, we examined fertility physicians’ perspectives on support of public funding and willingness to provide care in various scenarios.

Methods: We invited fertility physicians attending the 8th Congress of the Asia Pacific Initiative on Reproduction (ASPIRE 2018) to participate in a 10-minute survey. Participants completed the survey anonymously and in private.

Results: 78 out of 105 fertility physicians from 12 countries completed the survey (response rate = 74.3%). Mean age was 44.9 years (SD = 11.1). A majority of respondents supported public funding for ART: 76.3% for intrauterine insemination and 80.5% for in vitro fertilization. For controversial procedures, a majority agreed to provide social egg freezing (88.5%) compared to sex selection (25.6%) and gene editing for nonmedical reasons (19.2%), p < 0.001 for both comparisons. Support for public funding was also significantly higher for social egg freezing (51.3%) compared to sex selection (23.1%) and gene editing for nonmedical reasons (20.5%), p < 0.001 for both comparisons. For eligibility criteria, willingness to provide treatment to single women (50.0%) was significantly higher compared to other nontraditional family structures — single men (33.3%), p < 0.001, male homosexual couples (33.3%), p = 0.002, female homosexual couples (32.1%), p = 0.001 and unmarried heterosexual couples (32.1%), p = 0.004. Consistently, support for public finding was significantly higher for single women (32.1%) compared to single men (23.1%), p = 0.013, male homosexual couples (20.5%), p = 0.020, and unmarried heterosexual couples (20.5%), p = 0.006.

Conclusions: These results show support for public funding and conservative opinions toward ART for nontraditional family structures among physicians in the Asia-Pacific region.

Not only is it widely recognised that the nature and effectiveness of economic organisation is an absolutely central determinant of the most basic forms of individual and collective security (Beitz 1979), but many of the nations on the eastern side of the Asia-Pacific have also been famously preoccupied with a ‘comprehensive’ form of security that explicitly includes economic issues. Indeed, ideas about the way economic activity should be organised and the sort of role states should play as a consequence tend to be more encompassing and decidedly different from their counterparts in ‘the West’. At the very least, such structural and discursive variations serve as powerful reminders that, even in an age characterised by global processes and ever greater degrees of economic and political integration, significant differences remain — differences that often have an enduring regional dimension…

One of the more surprising things about the study of international relations (IR) is that scholars can come to such radically different views about what’s actually happening in the world. Clever people contemplating precisely the same set of events can come to strikingly dissimilar conclusions about their significance and causes, to say nothing of their likely trajectory. One might intuitively expect that greater expertise and the continuing refinement of the techniques and theories we use to try and make sense of the world would help us to come to some sort of consensus about big events, their underlying dynamics and possible impacts. Nothing could be further from the truth — even if we believe that such a thing exists, of course. If anything, the field is becoming more contested and ‘progress’ — another loaded, contentious and surprisingly unpopular term — remains elusive. In short, ‘there remains no agreement on what constitutes proper theory in IR’ (Dunne et al. 2013)…

At the end of the 1980s when the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum was inaugurated, it looked like an idea whose time had come. APEC seemed ideally placed to benefit from and facilitate the post-Cold War preoccupation with economic development and integration. Moreover, it held out the prospect of institutionalising and coordinating relations between the ‘miraculous’ economies of East Asia and the ‘Anglo-American’ nations of North America and Australasia. Given the importance of the United States as a security guarantor and export market for much of industrialising Asia, it seemed inevitable that ties between the Western and Eastern sides of the Pacific could only become stronger. Although the exact boundaries and content of the ‘Asia-Pacific’ region were always rather imprecise (Dirlik 1992), in the early 1990s economic, political and strategic ties seemed certain to give concrete expression to a vision that was enthusiastically championed by influential figures in Washington and — especially — Canberra and Tokyo (Funabashi 1995). How times change. A major recalibration of the goals and style of American foreign policy has not only rendered organisations like APEC with its explicit Asia-Pacific identity less important, but it has simultaneously encouraged the development of a more narrowly conceived form of East Asian regionalism that self-consciously excludes the United States…

One of the most striking features of the broadly-conceived ‘Asia-Pacific region’ is that the institutions that have emerged there have been much less powerful and effective than their counterparts in Western Europe. In part, we suggest, this has been a function of history and of a region divided by the Cold War. In part, it has been because many of the institutions have been deliberately designed so that they had less power than the European Union, which was seen as intruding on the sovereignty of its members in ways many Asian states were keen to avoid (Katzenstein 2005). And yet, paradoxically enough, despite a relatively modest level of institutional development and effectiveness in the Asia-Pacific, there is no shortage of initiatives and competing visions about how the region might develop. The questions, as ever, are about how any region is to be defined, who its members might be, and what purpose it might serve…

What a difference a decade makes. Writing as recently as 1993, Donald Crone’s widely-cited paper detailed an apparently inexorable transformation that was occurring in what he described as the ‘Pacific political economy’. Only ten years ago, American hegemony appeared to be in long-term, decline. Crucially, the apparent waning of American power opened up a space for greater assertiveness on the part of what we might now prefer to describe as East Asian rather than Pacific powers. The change in language is in itself revealing: notions like the Pacific political economy, the Pacific Rim, and even the Asia-Pacific have become not simply less fashionable, but indicative of an underlying transformation in relations between East Asia and North America and of the concomitant emergence of more narrowly conceived regional identities. At the core of this transformation has been a resurgence of American power and — crucially — a preparedness to use it in ways that are judged to further the United States’ economic, political and, above all, strategic interests…

Australia and Japan have frequently had difficult relations with their neighbours. Whether this is measured by Australia’s often frustrated attempts to gain entry to new regional forums, or Japan’s notoriously difficult relationships with China and Korea, both countries suffer from problems of acceptance and identity. In Australia’s case, other countries in East Asia — notably Malaysia under former Premier Mahathir — have questioned whether it is a ‘genuine’ member of the region (Broinowski 2003). While Japan is unambiguously ‘of’ East Asia, its leadership ambitions and good relations with the region have been undermined by its inability to come to terms with its historical role in the region (Wall 2005). Such issues have made the day-to-day conduct of relations in the region problematic for both countries, and raised fundamental questions about national identity and the enduring impact of each nation’s history. In both countries, the question of where each ‘belongs’, and to which other countries they should be most closely aligned, continue to be central parts of their respective national policy debates…