In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

For Southeast Asia, 2012 brought both challenges and opportunities to the region – from Cambodia’s chairmanship of ASEAN and further political opening in Burma (also known as Myanmar) to tensions in the South China Sea and the adoption of the ASEAN Declaration of Human Rights (ADHR).

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To paraphrase an expression often used by former President Ronald Reagan, “There they go again.” But in this case, it’s not the political opposition being referred to – it’s the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) in its latest global predictions report.

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For the past 30 years, Asia has been urbanizing at a faster rate than any other region in the world. In 2011, Asia was home to roughly 61 percent of the world’s population, or 4.2 billion people. More than 40 percent of them now live in urban areas. By 2025, Asia will have 21 of the world’s 37 megacities…

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Over the last several decades, Asia has become increasingly integrated with the rest of the world, its rapid development driven largely by exports to the United States and European Union. Yet, as the world’s main economic arteries shift eastward, intra-regional integration within Asia still lags behind.

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Last November, when a new leadership team stepped forward in Beijing, they confronted a very different set of challenges than their predecessors had faced. Among the most urgent of these is the challenge of providing adequate basic social services for all of China’s 1.3 billion people…

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