[YEDG] 1st of June- South Korea’s foreign brides Farmed out & 2 more,
Serena Park
Hi YEDGers!
Here is Serena, this week's facilitator!
As usual, we are going to have our discussion at coffeenie, Sinchon this Sunday morning (9:30 AM).
I hope to see you as many as possible!
Ciao from Serena,
South Korea’s foreign brides
Farmed out
Korean men are marrying foreigners more from choice than necessity
May 24th 2014 | From the print edition
The Vietnam-Korea axis of love
IN THE mid-1990s posters plastered on the subway in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, exhorted local girls to marry farmers. Young women had left their villages in droves since the 1960s for a better life in the booming city. Sons, however, stayed behind to tend family farms and fisheries.
The campaign was futile. Last year over a fifth of South Korean farmers and fishermen who tied the knot did so with a foreigner. The province of South Jeolla has the highest concentration of international marriages in the country—half of those getting married at the peak a decade ago. In those days, the business of broking unions with Chinese or South-East Asian women boomed, with matches made in the space of a few days. Not long ago placards in the provinces sang the praises of Vietnamese wives “who never run away”. Now, on the Seoul subway, banners encourage acceptance of multicultural families.
They are expected to exceed 1.5m by 2020, in a population of 50m. That is remarkable for a country that has long prided itself on its ethnic uniformity. But a preference for sons has led to a serious imbalance of the sexes. In 2010 half of all middle-aged men in South Korea were single, a fivefold increase since 1995. The birth rate has fallen to 1.3 children per woman of childbearing age, down from six in 1960. It is one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Without immigration, the country’s labour force will shrink drastically.
The government is the biggest enthusiast for a multi-ethnic country. Its budget for multicultural families has shot up 24-fold since 2007, to 107 billion won ($105m). Some 200 support centres offer interpreting services, language classes, child care and counselling. School textbooks now include a section on mixed-race families. And in 2012 mixed-race Koreans could join the army for the first time. When four Mongolians working illegally in South Korea pulled a dozen Korean colleagues from a fire in 2007, locals urged the government to grant them residency (it did).
Still, assimilation remains elusive. Four in ten mixed-race marriages break down in the first five years, according to a survey by the Korean Women’s Development Institute, a think-tank. In 2009 almost a fifth of children from mixed-race households who should have been in school were not. Many mothers have limited Korean. And discrimination lurks.
The government is now tightening up the marriage rules. Last month two new requirements came into force: a foreign bride must speak Korean, and a Korean groom must support her financially. Koreans are now limited to a single marriage-visa request every five years.
Critics say making marriage more difficult will only serve to speed up the greying of the workforce. The pool of eligible women will shrink, says Lee In-su, a marriage broker in Daegu in the south-east. Most foreign brides come from rural areas lacking language schools. Meanwhile, competition for brides from China, where men also outnumber women, is fierce.
In fact, the number of Korean men taking foreign brides is dropping, from 31,000 a year in 2005 to 18,000 last year. And nine-tenths of matches are now urban, says Mr Lee. Vietnamese girls no longer want to languish in the Korean countryside, says Kim Young-shin of the Korea-Vietnam Cultural Centre in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital. They like watching Korean dramas and listening to K-pop—urban pursuits.
As for Korean clients, says Lee Chang-min, a broker in Seoul, they are increasingly better educated and better-off; some are among the country’s top earners. Many are simply on lower rungs of the eligibility ladder in a culture captivated by credentials, whether in looks, age or family connections. Others, Mr Lee says, are wary of the stereotype of thedoenjangnyeo (a disparaging term for a class of Korean women seen as latte-loving gold-diggers). They prefer a wife who can assume a more traditional role than one many Korean women are nowadays willing to play. These men, the brokers lament, are now more likely to be introduced to their foreign wives through friends than through brokers. Perhaps a modest win for melting-pot Korea after all.
Narendra Modi
India’s strongman
Narendra Modi’s amazing victory gives India its best chance ever of prosperity
May 24th 2014 | From the print edition
THE most important change in the world over the past 30 years has been the rise of China. The increase in its average annual GDP per head from around $300 to $6,750 over the period has not just brought previously unimagined prosperity to hundreds of millions of people, but has also remade the world economy and geopolitics.
India’s GDP per head was the same as China’s three decades ago. It is now less than a quarter of the size. Despite a couple of bouts of reform and spurts of growth, India’s economy has never achieved the momentum that has dragged much of East Asia out of poverty. The human cost, in terms of frustrated, underemployed, ill-educated, unhealthy, hungry people, has been immense.
Now, for the first time ever, India has a strong government whose priority is growth. Narendra Modi, who leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has won a tremendous victory on the strength of promising to make India’s economy work. Although we did not endorse him, because we believe that he has not atoned sufficiently for the massacre of Muslims that took place in Gujarat while he was chief minister, we wish him every success: an Indian growth miracle would be a great thing not just for Indians, but also for the world.
From lackey to leader
Government is at the heart of India’s failure. The few strong governments India has had—always dominated by the Congress party, a Nehru-Gandhi family fief—have had rotten economic agendas. Reformist politicians—like the outgoing prime minister, Manmohan Singh—have lacked the clout to implement their policies.
That is partly because India is an extraordinarily hard place to govern. Much power is devolved to the states; the fissiparous nature of its polity means that deals have constantly to be done with a vast array of regional and caste-based parties; and a colonial and socialist past has bequeathed India a bureaucracy whose direction is hard to change.
Mr Singh, who was not much more than a Gandhi family retainer, had little chance of doing so. Mr Modi, by contrast, has huge authority, both within his party and in the country. The BJP’s victory owes something to good organisation but most to its leader’s appeal. Not since Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 has India had such a powerful personality in charge.
Mr Modi has an outright majority—282 of the 543 elected seats in Parliament’s lower house. Only Congress has ever won a majority by itself before, and it has not had one for 30 years. The combination of parliamentary clout and personal power means that Mr Modi has a better chance of getting state governments to go along with him than Mr Singh did. Congress, meanwhile, has been routed, retaining just 44 seats. The joke goes that until last week India had no government; now it has no opposition.
Compare Indian state electorate and voter numbers to entire nations with our interactive map
Mr Modi has a mandate for economic reform. Although his core supporters are religious nationalists, steeped in the glories of a Hindu past, it was the votes of the young, urban and educated that won him the election. They were turned off by Congress’s drift and venality, and its preference for welfare handouts over fostering opportunity. They want the chance of self-advancement that Mr Modi, a tea-seller’s son, both represents and promises.
His first task is to stabilise a fragile economy. He must clean out the banks (bad loans are preventing a recovery), sort out the government’s own finances (chronic deficits are at the root of India’s inflation), cut subsidies, widen the tax base and allow the central bank to pursue a tougher anti-inflation policy.
His second task is to create jobs. Labour laws are rigid, land for factories often impossible to acquire at any price, and electricity patchy. Mr Modi must launch sweeping land reforms, crack heads in the misfiring coal and electricity industries and make India more of a single market not just by improving roads, ports and the like, but also by cutting the red tape that Balkanises the economy. A national sales tax would help here, replacing myriad local levies. Such relatively straightforward steps could make a powerful difference, raising the Indian growth rate by two or even three percentage points from its current 4-5%.
Reaching out to Pakistan would bring economic as well as security benefits. Trade between Pakistan and India is currently negligible, and there is huge scope for growth. As a leader from the nationalist right, Mr Modi is well placed to bring about a rapprochement, rather as Menachem Begin could make peace between Israel and Egypt. The initial signs are good: Mr Modi has invited Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to his inauguration.
One rule for all
There are three main dangers. One is that Mr Modi turns out to be more of a Hindu nationalist than an economic reformer. He has spoken of “bringing everyone along”. But while he has already worshipped at the Ganges since his victory, promising to clean up the river sacred to Hindus, he has not brought himself to mention Muslims, who make up 15% of the population.
A second danger is that he is defeated by the country’s complexity. His efforts at reform, like all previous reformers’ efforts, may be overwhelmed by a combination of politics, bureaucracy and corruption. If that happens, India will be condemned to another generation or two of underachievement.
A third is that Mr Modi’s strength will go to his head, and he will rule as an autocrat, not a democrat—as Indira Gandhi did for a while. There are grounds for concern. After years of drift under Congress, some of the country’s institutions have rotted. The main police investigator is politically directed, the media can be bought, the central bank, which does not have statutory independence, has been bullied before, and Mr Modi has authoritarian tendencies.
The risks are there, but this is a time for optimism. With a strong government committed to growth and a population hungry for it, India has its best chance of making a break for prosperity since independence.
Decentralising drug research
Pharmed out
Why the row over giant drug-company takeovers misses the point
May 24th 2014 | NEW YORK
IAN READ, the chief executive of Pfizer, is not a man easily rebuffed. His attempt to woo AstraZeneca, a British drugs firm, included politesse—appearances before Parliament, web videos on Pfizer’s strategy—and, more importantly, a sweetened offer on May 18th worth around £70 billion ($120 billion). However, AstraZeneca’s board has rejected the bid and, as we went to press, it seemed dead in the water.
British politicians had cast Pfizer as a ruthless cost-cutter, out to gut British innovators. A rejected deal would therefore seem good for AstraZeneca and good for Britain. This reasoning, however, skirts two basic facts. First, AstraZeneca faces a rocky path on its own. The firm’s share price plunged by 12% on May 19th. The company will struggle to meet its goals of expanding revenue by 75% by 2023. More importantly, any relief at having saved a “national champion” ignores how modern pharmaceutical companies work.
Drugs firms are global, with operations distributed around the world. AstraZeneca, for example, has three main research centres. One is in Britain, but the others are in Sweden and America. The company has about as many staff in the Asia-Pacific region as in Europe. Drugs companies have also had to become ever more reliant on external partners in recent years. The change follows a treacherous period. As firms headed inexorably towards the “patent cliff”, the point at which they would lose intellectual-property rights over their bestselling drugs, investors doubted their ability to turn out new blockbusters. Bureaucratic in-house research departments inspired little confidence, trudging on with mediocre drugs that failed, expensively, in clinical trials.
Now, much of the work of discovering a medicine and testing, making it and selling it is done in partnership. For example, one way to cut the cost of drug trials is to hire clinical-research organisations. One such firm, Quintiles, of America, works in 100 countries. The company’s network helps it deal with regulators, find patients to take part in trials and recruit doctors to oversee them. Morningstar, an investment-research firm, reports that 33% of global companies’ drug development was outsourced to clinical-research firms in 2012. By 2022 it expects that share to reach 50%.
Firms’ changes to their research departments have been even more dramatic. Many have made deep cuts in those departments’ budgets. (AstraZeneca spent 16% less on research last year than it did in 2007.) They have not entirely given up investigating promising routes to potential new drugs, but the burden is increasingly left with outsiders.
Profitable new treatments can be “discovered” through mergers—many of AstraZeneca’s most promising drugs are thanks to the 2007 purchase of an American company. Or through licensing: Sanofi, a French giant, has a deal to sell drugs developed by Regeneron, an American biotech firm. Pharma firms cluster near universities—GlaxoSmithKline has more than 1,700 research deals with academia. And governments, which have long invested in the earliest stages of research, are now going further. On May 6th the European Union’s leaders approved the next phase of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private partnership to speed the development of new drugs. In February America’s National Institutes of Health and ten drugs companies announced an effort to accelerate research on intractable ailments, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
This does not mean that big drugmakers, and where they put their headquarters, are irrelevant. But the most successful ones will look ever less like the national champions of yore. For a hint of the future, take Index Ventures, a venture-capital firm. It invests in drug firms which each have a tiny staff, who oversee a drug’s development but hire outside labs and manufacturers to do most of the work. With little money sunk in fixed infrastructure, their executives are more likely to abandon unfruitful drugs earlier, diverting resources to more promising ones. This seems like a winning model not just to venture capitalists but to big pharma firms: Index’s investors include GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson.