Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from MacroScope:
Spend Save Man Woman
Far from being lauded as a virtue, China's high savings rate has been blamed for the economic imbalances underlying the global financial crisis. The criticism being that the Chinese spend too little and rely too much on exporting to Western consumers.
The IMF and World Bank have long called for Beijing to ramp up social spending so its citizens will feel less need to save for a rainy day and instead consume more.
But in their intriguingly named paper, 'A Sexually Unbalanced Model of Current Account Imbalances', New York-based researchers Du Qingyuan and Wei Shang-Jin suggest China's gender imbalance could also be a significant factor in the persistence of its high savings rate.
The pair argue that intensifying competition in the Chinese marriage market is causing men -- or indeed parents with sons -- to raise their savings rates to improve their relative allure among a shrinking pool of potential brides.
A draconian one-child policy, coupled with a traditional preference for male offspring and the availability of selective-sex abortion, has left the country of 1.3 billion facing its most serious demographic crisis.
An estimated 119 boys are born per 100 girls and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has warned that this could leave more than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age without spouses by 2020.
This anxiety over the worsening marriage prospects for men could explain why Chinese household savings as a share of disposable income has risen from 16 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2007.
Anti-sectarian law only skin-deep in Lebanon
When Lebanese Interior Minister Ziad Baroud issued a memorandum giving Lebanese citizens the option to remove their sect from civil registry records, it seemed like a step towards removing deeply embedded sectarianism from Lebanon’s social fabric.
The country has been convulsed by bouts of sectarian violence, most notably the 1975-90 civil war, in which 150,000 people were killed, and more recently last May when a power struggle spilled into armed conflict and supporters of Shi’ite Hezbollah briefly took over parts of Sunni western Beirut.
Study the measure a little more closely and some questions emerge. What happens to those wanting to run for seats in parliament, which are distributed according to sect to satisfy Lebanon’s delicate power-sharing balance? What about citizens who have to go to court over personal status issues, which in Lebanon are presided over by courts run by religious sects? Ultimately, they have no choice but to reveal their religious affiliation.
So it is doubtful that this measure will really remove sectarianism from Lebanon’s moral and social consciousness, especially when you have a political and legal structure in which sectarianism is required to achieve a power-sharing balance to accommodate 17 different religious communities.
The Lebanese media has covered this issue extensively: ”The change is a step in the right direction but it is not sufficient. The government needs to take the next step and ensure that all Lebanese have access to personal status laws that aren’t religiously based,” said Human Rights Watch’s Nadim Houry. “The Lebanese confessional system is discriminatory and has proven to be a failure,” he told Reuters.
After all it is still common to come across taxi drivers who refuse to foray into Sunni Muslim western Beirut from Christian eastern Beirut. And some are reluctant to venture into southern Beirut, a Shi’ite Hezbollah stronghold.
Some Lebanese will even admit to feeling uncomfortable in districts which they are not religiously affiliated to. And while most will poo-poo sectarianism, they will almost always support the political party that is based on their religious affiliation. It is a testament to how ingrained sectarianism is in Lebanon’s culture that it is the subject of office politics, jokes and the main soccer teams are divided on Sunni-Sh’ite lines.
Today we live in times were it is easy for any individual to complain and argue the negative in any situation, we cal it “freedom of speech” but i wonder how many of those who have negative speech have lived among the people that they so easily verbally abuse by using vocabulary thats makes the report sound eligant, countries live by what they have rather than promises of a better future that never seems to happen, people living in times were the western world interfers in century old unions between religious groups, they claim religion has no place simply because that is the system they obide by, they should understand that its not how other countries work, and the sectarian violence throughout lebanons history is simply controlled by malitia who have no regard for there religion or for human kind, not a battle of religions, this would only be understood if one has lived through such difficulties with the people of that land. throughout the civil wars people of all religious backgrounds helped and supported one another to bring peace, if thats not proof of valor and respect then i dnt know what it, lebanon is lebanon not america nor england and it is run based on its needs and wants, not the needs of other countries and there gospel of a better future for all, lebanon is a land of freedom that is beeing infected with vicious ideologies of western culture and sectarianism, every country has its people, every country has its system, and every country should run its own.
Lebanese lovers escape sectarian strait-jacket
Lebanon’s beaches, ski slopes and nightclubs exude glitzy modernity. Its educated elite appears cosmopolitan and sophisticated. But beneath the gloss lie deeply traditional aspects of a society reluctant to shake off a sectarian power-sharing system in which loyalty to one of Lebanon’s 17 religious communities takes precedence over citizenship.
Nothing illustrates this better than star-crossed lovers.
Take Laure and Ali, who began dating six years ago after a chance encounter at university in Beirut when they were both 21. She studied political science and now works for an international aid organization. He is a computer and communications engineer.
Long ago they decided to wed, but there was a snag. Laure is Christian, Ali a Shi’ite Muslim, though they say these identities are just “on paper”. Their families opposed the match across the religious divide, just as they were against the romance from the start.
“My parents had different arguments, none of them convincing,” recalls Laure. “They said the two families would never get along. They worried what people would say. They said: ‘He’s going to force you to wear a veil, maybe now he’s tolerant, but later he will get more and more into religion’. And then it was the kids, what would the kids be?”
The objections of Ali’s parents also revolved on social fears, not religious convictions. “If they were very religious, I would understand their point of view. But they are not, so I couldn’t understand their opposition,” he says.
Laure and Ali could have eloped, as many Lebanese couples in their plight do. Instead they chose a long, uncertain but ultimately successful quest to win over their families.
