Analogous Cycles with Lagged Co-movement: U.S. and East Asian Business Cycles

In selected East Asian economies, the behavior of detrended macroeconomic variables was found to be similar to that observed in the postwar U.S. economy. Consumption and investment are highly procyclical while the balance of trade and the price level are counter-cyclical in most of them. Labor productivity is procyclical in general. The high coherence between U.S. GDP and that of the East Asian economies suggests that business cycles in terms of frequency are also similar between the United States and East Asia. However, the GDP and consumption of East Asian countries do not necessarily co-move well with current U.S. and Japanese GDP and consumption, while East Asian consumption tends to co-move more with lagged U.S. and Japanese consumption.

Issues Affecting the Movement of Rural Labour in Myanmar: Rakhine Case Study

This paper presents issues affecting the movement of rural labour in Myanmar, by examining the background, purpose and earned income of labourers migrating to fishing villages in southern Rakhine. A broad range of socioeconomic classes, from poor to rich, farmers to fishermen, is migrating from broader areas to specific labour-intensive fishing subsectors, such as anchovy fishing. These labourers are a mixed group of people whose motives lie either in supplementing their household income or accumulating capital for further expansion of their economic activities. The concentration of migrating labourers with different objectives in this particular unstable, unskilled employment opportunity suggests an insufficiently developed domestic labour market in rural Myanmar. There is a pressing need to create stable labour-intensive industries to meet this demand.

The anti-apartheid movement in Japan : an overview

Anti-apartheid movements outside South Africa have been recently becoming a popular research topic as an indispensable part of the history of the liberation struggle against apartheid, as well as from the “global civil society” point of view, i.e. anti-apartheid movements as one of the earliest examples of transnational social movements with the aim of realization of global justice. The Japanese movement, however, has attracted little attention so far, despite its history of nearly half century. The Japanese movement’s characteristic foci and style, reflecting the unique position of Japan as a non-white nation with strong trade relations with white-dominated South Africa, certainly deserves detailed study. This paper is an attempt to fill the gap by outlining the history of the anti-apartheid movement in Japan.

The framing discourses of 'Honorary white' in the anti-apartheid movement in Japan

International and transnational solidarity is being increasingly recognized as an indispensable part in the recent historiography on the liberation struggle in Southern Africa. Yet the literature has mostly focused on anti-apartheid movements in the West, and anti-apartheid movements in Asia have attracted little attention. Focusing on the Japanese citizens' movement (shimin undo) against apartheid, which loosely coalesced into the Japan Anti-Apartheid Committee (JAAC), this paper looks into how the issue of 'honorary white' was brought into the early period of the anti-apartheid movement in Japan, and how the framing discourses of the movement was developed around the issue.