Ageing in a global context : the Asia-Pacific region

The Asia-Pacific is a rather ambiguously described region which has wholly or in part been termed at various times the ‘Asia(n) Pacific’, ‘the Pacific rim’, ‘Pacific Asia’, ‘East Asia’ and ‘East and Southeast Asia’ (geographically perhaps the most precise term) and, Eurocentrically, ‘the Far East’ (Phillips, 2000). It stretches from Japan and China in the north to Indonesia in the south, and some definitions include Australasia although, in this chapter, we do not cover Australia, New Zealand, or the Oceania island states explicitly (see, however, Chapter 40 ). There are also numerous political, economic, and strategic regional groupings, such as ASEAN and APEC, along with regional offices of the United Nations and other international agencies such as the WHO, UNFPA, UNESCAP, and HelpAge International. Nevertheless, the Asia-Pacific region has evolved as a subglobal system of commonality and competition, a recognizable entity to many people living, working, and researching in the area.