Accumulated knowledge about nature is an important part of people's capacityto manage and conserve the environment. But this ecological knowledge is now being increasingly lost. There have been few cross-cultural and quantitative studies to describe the phenomenon of its loss. Here we show a strong inverse correlation between ecological knowledge and income levels in and among India, Indonesia,...

In terms of economic development, China is widely acclaimed as a miracle economy. Over a period of rapid economic growth, however, China's reputation for health has been slipping. In the 1970s China was a shining example of health development, but no longer. Government and public concerns about health equity have grown. China's health-equity challenges are truly daunting because of a vicious cy...

The important of the demographic dividend to East Asian economic growth is now widely recognized. During the last four decades of the 20 Century the working age populations grew much more rapidly than the dependent populations fueling growth in per capita income. Over the coming decades, however, demographic change is seemingly unfavorable. In the coming decades the working-age populations of m...

In earlier debates on economic development, the agricultural sector’s role was somewhat controversial. While dualistic models highlighted the importance of agriculture, the mainstream literature placed a greater emphasis on the creation of a modern industrial sector. Soon agriculture disappeared from the mainstream development literature to re-emerge recently with a variety of multiple-sector g...