Asia's Developing Future

Global governance has undergone significant change since the late 1990s, with the number of global players in health, trade, and development finance rapidly increasing, mobilizing more funds for health and development in developing countries, and spurring global trade. This trend has challenged the three most prominent intergovernmental bodies in these areas—the World Health Organization, the Worl...

Big swings in global commodity prices unnerve governments in developing countries reliant on such export revenue, and curb credit growth as banks tighten lending during price volatility. A look at 1,600 banks from 78 developing countries between 2004 and 2015, a period of large swings in commodity prices, found lenders become more cautious when prices fluctuate because clients may not be able to s...

Water may be saved through trade provided it moves from countries that use water wisely to those lacking water, as a coming water crisis—driven by climate change, neglect of infrastructure, and misguided policies—threatens global economic growth in countries struggling to develop, and in developed countries. Savings don’t refer to the volume of virtual water of the imported product, but to the vol...

Laws in developing countries generally reflect their unique cultures, which may restrict innovation and risk-taking, throwing obstacles in the path to development. Strong legal mechanisms, including intellectual property rights and patent protection, allow innovation to thrive. More than elsewhere in Asia, Southeast Asian countries emphasize the economic value of intellectual property rights on pa...

China’s 2009 economic stimulus program after the global financial crisis led to the growth of shadow banking as local governments scrambled to pay off their obligations under the program. Regulators loosened borrowing rules to avoid a debt crunch, posing risks to the financial system, but in doing so accelerated China’s financial liberalization. Asian Development Bank Institute research details th...

A coming water crisis, driven by climate change, neglect of infrastructure, and misguided policies, is threatening global economic growth in countries struggling to develop, and in developed countries, too. The water crisis is partly due to climate change and the increasing unpredictability of weather, but a lot has to do with the behavior of global trade, trade policies, and institutions that bel...

Developing countries can benefit from globalization if they fix potential problems at home before opening their economies. Failing to do so can multiply local problems as money streams across borders, suggests ADBI research. For a number of reasons, developing countries might end up worse off if they allow their currencies to float freely and remove controls on money flowing in and out of their co...

Peer-to-peer or P2P lending is a way of financing debt online so that people can borrow and lend money without going through a financial institution, like a bank. P2P, also known as social lending or crowd lending, has no need for a middleman and has emerged as an alternative to traditional lending institutions around the world. An Asian Development Bank Institute study using data from Renrendai,...

Analysts and economists explain: How India’s government pushes for more urbanization by creating towns that will grow along with information technology. Read the transcript: http://bit.ly/2j6m649 What emerging economies can learn from South Korea, and how it weathered the Asian financial crisis and came out of it even stronger. Read the transcript: http://bit.ly/2G4YerO How corruption and weak nat...

Providing total and improved sanitation services is a challenge across Asia, as population growth—up 5.7% on average in the past two decades—overwhelms existing infrastructure and outpaces planning. In Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, 1.7 billion people do not have access to safe sanitation, 780 million still practice open defecation, and 80% of waste water is dumped withou...

Small and medium-sized enterprises are the backbone of Asia’s economies. The Asian Development Bank’s most recent SME survey covered 20 countries in Central, East, South, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific and showed that SMEs accounted for an average of 96% of all enterprises and 62% of the national labor force. SMEs contributed an average of 42% of the gross domestic product or manufacturing value a...

Basic household sanitation has long been outside the reach of cost-effective comprehensive solutions, especially in communities dependent on septic rather than sewage systems. But this is changing. Groups as varied as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a coalition of private-sector water technology interests are attacking the problems of fecal sludge management, or FSM, particularly in unders...

Recent demographic and societal changes in both developing and developed countries have affected the employment of migrant workers in economies worldwide, and few sectors illustrate the international impact of these changes more than domestic work and home-based care. An increase in women’s employment, rapid population aging, increasing life expectancy, and lower fertility rates have strained trad...

Women who own small businesses are increasingly turning to digital platforms to source capital for growth as they battle discrimination from formal channels. Small and medium-sized enterprises consistently cite access to credit as the biggest constraint on growth and trade, and a 2016 survey commissioned by the Asian Development Bank confirmed that export firms headed by women reported greater dif...

Emerging economies can learn a lot from how the Republic of Korea faced down the financial crises of 1997 and 2008, and emerged from hard economic slowdown stronger than ever. Painful macroeconomic and financial reforms plugged structural weaknesses and restored investor confidence, and have put Korea in a better position to weather similar shocks, offering lessons for emerging Asian economies. Re...

An already widening gap between rich and poor in the People’s Republic of China is likely to worsen due to its rapidly aging population. Increasing life expectancy and the effect of a decades-long family planning policy that limited the number of children people could have is felt throughout the economy. At the end of 2011, the number of people over 60 years old in the PRC reached 185 million or 1...

Robust institutions and low levels of corruption are more important to reducing hunger than population size or the state of a country’s natural resources. Food security—the ability of a country to feed its people—will become even more important in coming years as Asia’s population rises and resources grow scarcer. A study of 10 countries in Asia and the Middle East found that food security grows a...

India and the People’s Republic of China must act quickly if they are to have enough to eat over the coming decades. For the PRC, the biggest challenges come before 2030, when its population is expected to peak, then decline. India, which will take over the mantle of the world’s most populous country around that time, will see its food needs continue to grow for decades after that, especially if i...

It can be hard to measure the effects of infrastructure investment on an economy. Knowing whether an investment worked means somehow identifying the revenue it generated amidst the noise of an economy in full swing. An Asian Development Bank Institute study used tax revenue as a measure of growth, and found significant contributions generated by the construction and operation of the line and the e...

Trade deficits are considered bad news for economies, and for an economy the size of the United States, a deficit of $745 billion in 2015, the largest seen in decades, would be cause for alarm. But the true picture is more complex. Looking beyond traditional statistics shows how burgeoning global value chains are now driving changes in the manufacturing of, trade in, and value of goods. Multinatio...

Brexit and a potential US withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement could have large ripple effects on trade in Asia, helping some countries and hurting others, according to prominent trade economist Ben Shepherd. What’s more, Asia’s tightly integrated supply chains could be disrupted in the aftermath. Shepherd told a seminar at the Asian Development Bank Institute that although the...

Improved transportation links help communities prosper financially, but there’s an unexpected social dividend that can compound that prosperity—lower rates of smoking and drinking and higher levels of school attendance. The Philippine government started its “Ro-Ro” policy in 2003 to link up islands and other remote areas in the archipelago nation with a system of roll-on, roll-off ferries. Family...

Urban areas contribute nearly two-thirds of India’s gross domestic product, even though they account for only 31 percent of the country’s population. They are India’s growth engines. More remarkable is that India leapfrogged the manufacturing revolution and transitioned from agriculture to a service-based economy, with services now contributing 60 percent of GDP. In 2014, the “Make in India” polic...

Urbanization is associated with economic growth, but it’s a fine balance before rural poverty simply shifts to the cities and the cities become too big to sustain development, sucking growth out of gross domestic product. Economic growth and development, urbanization, and energy and electricity consumption are all closely linked, but economic progress does not equal economic development if the poo...

Urbanization has accelerated in the past few decades as thousands daily move to towns and cities in search of a better life, or better education opportunities for their children. Economic development is a natural spur to internal migration, but other factors may be may be in play in recent rapid demographic shifts, not least wider access to information over the Internet. Slums, overcrowding, traff...