Word: parks
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...then there was South Korea's Park Chung Hee. A general who took control of the country in a 1961 coup, he ruled, often with an iron fist, for 18 years. Yet he was deeply moved by South Korea's destitution. In the early 1960s, the country's per capita income was just over $100, and the economy depended on American aid. Park, a virulent nationalist, vowed to do something about it. "I had to break, once and for all, the vicious cycle of poverty and economic stagnation," he later wrote...
...solution Park divined was to hitch South Korea's future to an expanding global economy. The country used its cheap labor force to manufacture necessities like shoes and clothing to sell to consumers in the developed world, particularly those in the U.S. The strategy proved wonderfully efficient. It attracted investment capital, generated factory jobs for impoverished farmers, established infrastructure to supercharge commercial development and otherwise produced wealth that South Korea could never have generated by itself. Eager to raise living standards in their own countries, Asian policymakers and business people latched on to that formula. The economies of South Korea...
...resemble a vast Ponzi scheme--one precariously perched on expectations that debt-soaked Americans would buy more TVs, computers and cars forever. Those expectations have been dashed, leaving the tigers with excess manufacturing capacity and a burgeoning army of unemployed workers. At Taiwan's Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park, home to many of the island's flagship tech firms, most workers are taking unpaid leave at least one day a week. Ryan Wu, chief operating officer of the job-search website 1111 Job Bank, says conditions at Hsinchu have never been so dire. "There's extreme panic right...
...tigers really want to thrive, the answer might lie in rejecting a legacy of Park Chung Hee: the idea that government alone can successfully engineer high economic performance. Jim Walker, an economist at the research firm Asianomics in Hong Kong, argues that Asia's politicians still intervene too much in their economies instead of allowing market forces to work. "What governments need to do is start trusting their own people rather than hoping the West is going to get it right all of the time," Walker says. For the tigers to keep roaring, they may need to find their future...
...Australian bush, wandering around a remote patch of Queensland that is the last redoubt of one of the world's rarest large mammals: the northern hairy-nosed wombat. Only 115 of the burrowing, nocturnal marsupials survive in this 7,800-acre (3,160 hectare) preserve at Epping Forest National Park, and I've ventured out in the hope of spotting one. As my footsteps send wallabies bounding through the scrub, something shuffles through the grass a few yards ahead. I aim my flashlight, and I'm startled to find myself confronting a small, bearlike wombat. I've just become...