Universal health coverage is not only morally correct, but vital for a country’s economic development, the president of the World Bank told a conference in Japan yesterday.
Jim Yong Kim said instituting a system that ensures the whole population has access to medical care is key to reducing poverty in the developing world.
“Japan committed to universal health coverage [in 1961] at a time when the GDP per capita wasn’t among the highest in the world and at a time when many people outside of Japan thought that Japan could not afford to provide universal health coverage,” Kim said.
“The World Bank and leading economic development experts think that was one of the keys to Japanese economic development,” Kim said.
After devastation and defeat in World War II, Japan rose quickly to become one of the world’s leading economies and enjoyed decades of rapid growth.
Under the Japanese public health system, a patient pays up to 30 percent of the medical bill, with a social insurance scheme and general taxation paying the rest.
Government ministers from developing nations around the world were invited to the one-day conference in Tokyo, hosted jointly by the World Bank and the Japanese government.
Open access to healthcare is “one of the best things you can do to spur immediate and long-term economic growth... and one way of reducing inequality [which can] slow economic growth,” Kim told the meeting.
Separately, Germany’s central bank yesterday raised its growth forecast for Germany next year to 1.7 percent, citing expanding domestic demand in its upbeat assessment.
The forecast was up from the central Bundesbank’s prediction made in June of 1.5 percent GDP growth for next year, citing an easing of the wider eurozone crisis.
In 2015, it said, the growth rate would accelerate to 2 percent.
“The German economy is in good shape,” bank President Jens Weidmann said.
“The unemployment rate is low, employment is rising, and wage growth is returning to normal,” Weidmann added.
The bank also raised its GDP growth projection for Germany for this year to “no more than 0.5 percent,” from 0.3 percent six months ago.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day