Country Differences in Urban Problems. It is a fair question to ask whether all countries of the region are alike in their assessment of urban problems. It would be reasonable to expect that the different levels of development would affect the type and severity of the problems urban administrators face. Japan is a country of full employment, with very low rates of population growth. Other countries, especially the poorer and low income may have very different problems than those experienced by Japan. Table 19 shows the rank order of countries in their overall mean score of urban problems.

Table 19.
Rank Order of Overall Standard Scores
of Urban Problems for 10 Asian Countries

There is a general tendency for the high income countries to give overall higher scores than the poorer and low income. Japan and Malaysia are high, and Nepal, India and Pakistan are low. But there are also major exceptions. Korean administrators give lower scores than the country's level of development would predict and Indonesia's score is substantially higher than its per capita GDP would predict. We are, however, dealing with subjective judgments and there is obviously a great deal that goes into these judgments. For example, Indonesia's economy has been growing at a very respectable rate, even with the downturn of the world economy, and its administrators rate both the food and economy scores higher than their overall average.*5 Thus the administrators may be reacting generally to the relatively favorable economic dynamics of the moment. On the other hand the Korea administrators, especially in the smaller or medium sized cities, may well be reacting to the strains of rapid economic growth and the almost constant need to readjust.

If we wish to determine whether countries rank their problems in the same way or differently, we can express each problem category score as a ratio of the country's overall problem score. This is what we show in table 20, where a country's score for any of the ten items is divided by its overall average score, times 100. This provides an index that should be relatively easy to interpret, since it shows both the rank order of each problem area and how close or distant it is to the central tendency of the country. For ease in interpretation, we have kept the same rank order of problems as is shown in Table 19.

Overall there is a great deal of similarity in the ranking of problems, especially at the lower end. All countries find public utilities and transportation to be among their most serious problems (all scores are below 100). Pakistan is unusual here in that it finds even greater problems in health and energy than in these indicators of a stressed infrastructure.

At the upper end, education and health tend to be the highly rated in all countries (all scores are above 100 except for Pakistan's health score). We found this to be true in the first inquiry and explained it by noting the general advance all Asian countries had made in education and health in the past few decades. The objective indicators of this change are fbund in table 3, where all countries register signincant gains in reducing mortality and increasing the levels of school enrollment. In most cases, education and health rank highest for the admimistrators, but there are minor exceptions. Korean administrators find greater satisfaction in energy availability than in education. Nepal finds education problems more serious than those of employment, houslng and even crime. And PakiStan's health problems are more serious than housing, crime, and even transportation. Even where education and health are not rated at the top, however, they are rated high in all countries, with the exceptlon of health in Pakistan.

Crime and employment are far less serious problems in China, Nepal and Japan than they are in other countries. Malaysla, too, considers its employment problems far less serious than do other countries.

Table 20a
Relative Problem Scores for
Higher Scoring Categories

Table 20b
Relative Scores for
Lower Scoring Problem Categories

*5 In addition, we did not receive full scores fbr three items from lndonesia. Two of these, transportation and housing, tend to get low scores, while health gets higher scores. The total effect of these missing data, thus, may be to inflate Indonesia's overall score somewhat. lf we substitute the average scores for these three items in the Indonesian calculation, the score does drop, but only to 3.18, still slightly above Malaysia. It appears that the Indonesian adminstrators are rather up-beat about their cities.