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The article focuses on population geography of the Southern Hemisphere with special reference to Asia and the Pacific region. The Southern Hemisphere has around 60 percent of global population and thus the population research of the region is strong. Issues like population growth, rural-urban migration and urbanization, brain drain, gender inequality and the spread of HIV/AIDS are prominent in the region. Geography strength is ineven in Asia with greater concentrations in countries influenced by the British.

The forces of economic and social change are reworking rural areas of the developing world, sometimes fundamentally so. Agriculture is being squeezed by nonagricultural pursuits, aspirations are increasingly informed by a wish to avoid farming and the ‘household’ is being restructured as the genders and generations contest and renegotiate their respective roles. The diversification of the household economy and the interpenetration of rural and urban have created multiple hybridities where individuals and households shift between agricultural and industrial pursuits and cross between rural and urban areas. Farm is in thrall to nonfarm, and industry is often dependent on ‘rural’ labour. Drawing largely on work from southeast Asia, the article reviews these changes to rural life and livelihood, discusses their impacts on agriculture and reflects on their implications for rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soon after the third-world state was declared impotent, contradictory evidence pointing to the importance of state leadership in development in the Asian miracles came to the fore. This article, through a critical review of the literature, pushes this argument further and claims that geographers have much to contribute to the analysis of the state and its role in development. An appropriate framework for this kind of work is a marriage of radical political economy and certain strands of neo-Weberianism. We suggest that this conceptual union allows for broad theorizing of the capitalist state in the periphery while minding the institutional details of third-world states in particular regions and countries. This approach can help explain the differential performances of various third-world states within the confines of the world system. Thailand and Botswana are used as comparative cases to demonstrate the utility of this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In this paper I seek to review recent work on Chinese urban geography and to appraise the development of China's urban geography as a field of study both inside and outside China. The temporal scope will span scholarship finished and published mainly during the 1980s." The focus is on works published in English. The author examines the primary topics of interest, methodologies and theories, and available sources of data., (excerpt)