Contenu du sommaire

Macao, Precariousness and Permanence. — Clinging to the Chinese coast for more than four centuries, the Portuguese colony of Macao has known alternating periods of greatness and decline. The city has suddenly awakened from his recent torpor and is showing a new face. Following a brief description of its geographical location and population, the pre¬ sent study focuses particularly on an analysis of economic structures while stressing their originality. It concludes with questions about the colony's future.

Agrarian Reform in the Philippines and the First Preliminary Results. — The agrarian reform effectively started in 1972 and concerns all farms raising paddy and corn crops. It consists of two main operations : 1) An operation of land transfer (OLT) concerning all tenanted land over 7 hectares. These transfers apply to 427 000 tenants and 720 000 hectares of such lands ; 2) A "leasehold operation" concerning all tenanted rice and corn lands of 7 hectares or less that has until recently been exploited on a sharecropper basis. This operation affects 527 000 tenants and 560 000 hectares of land. The preliminary results are far from negligible since all the tenants have, in principle, been identified and all the certificates of land transfer (CLT) issued. Beside that, the lease contracts are speading. Nevertheless, some important problems remain such as land evaluation, a real bottleneck of the reform at present, and the insufficiency of the land consolidation program, without which no possible success can be achieved in the long run ; this is a situation that has been made even more complex because of the present unfavorable economic and political climate.

Pilgrims and donors in a Birmanian Buddhistic monastery. — Two pilgrimages to Samataung pagoda, «the alphabet's hill», during 1978 and 1980 years, allowed to apprehend the economy of such a religious place and to mesure the geographical area of its spiritual attractiveness from the investigation of the register of arrivals and deeds of gifts.