[lbo-talk] Nepal and the Philippines

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Apr 25 15:21:15 PDT 2006


On 4/25/06, Dennis Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote:
>
> > Or we can draw a parallel between Nepal and the Philippines today.
>
> They're in very different geopolitical locations. The Philippines has
> extensive trade and cultural links with East Asia and the US, it's
> something like 60% urbanized, has enormous internal cultural diversity,
> and is a heck of a lot more industrialized, with major cities and
> industries. From what little I know, Nepal has an agrarian-based economy,
> and very little urbanization.

Well, many countries in the world are more urbanized than Nepal, where probably more than 80% live in the countryside. But the Filipinos are still largely dependent on agriculture:

<blockquote>Total employment in January 2006 was 32.4 million, resulting to national employment rate of 91.9 percent.

The agriculture, fishery and forestry sector posted the highest increase in employment at 475 thousand. Employment in this sector grew by 4.2 percent, from 11.4 million in January 2005 to 11.8 million in January 2006.

Employment also grew in services sector with all sectors registering positive employment growth except health and social work, which declined by 8.4 percent, from 382 thousand in January 2005 to 350 thousand in January 2006.

On the other hand, employment in the industry sector registered a negative growth of 95 thousand, from 4.977 million in January 2005 to 4.882 million this year.

<http://www.census.gov.ph/data/pressrelease/2006/lf0601tx.html></blockquote>

As for languages, quite a few languages are listed as living languages in Nepal: <http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=NP>. The wiki entry on the subject says Nepali is spoken as mother tongue by half the people in Nepal, and many of the rest probably speak it as second language. There sure are some Nepali speakers in India, too, and I'd think that Nepali must be similar to some Indian languages.

That said, the comparisons Mike and I made concern politics of urban-rural alliance, rather than economy or culture.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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