Asia's Developing Future

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...

Developing Asian countries must introduce more comprehensive public welfare programs for the elderly as their economies transition from traditional filial altruism and the extended family to parental altruism and the nuclear family. As an economy develops, increasingly large amounts of resources are transferred from working adults, who produce more than they consume, to their parents and children,...

Indonesia’s economy grew rapidly over the past 30 years, in large part due to sweeping political and institutional reforms, the right mix of economic policy packages, and the development of fairer economic institutions, but progress made in reducing poverty and income inequality is faltering. In 1996, the richest Indonesians had six times more income than the poorest. In 2014, the richest had ten...

Hit by the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis, economies in Southeast Asia adopted unconventional monetary policy measures to ride out the financial storm, and were the stronger for it, teaching a few unorthodox lessons to developed economies left reeling by the global crisis a decade later. Central banks were initially at a loss about what to do, as share prices and asset values plunged, currencies...

Around the world, researchers and analysts are closely watching the economic performance of the People’s Republic of China in the wake of its recent slowing growth and the possible impact of that downturn on developed and developing economies. The Asia and Pacific region is anxious, and the rest of the world has reason to worry about the consequences of a slowdown in the world’s second-largest eco...

Developing countries are relatively well positioned as they expand their energy capacity, with a banquet of climate-clean, sustainable, and renewable sources to choose from, while developed countries try to overcome centralization and replace long-established fossil and fissile sources bound up in laws and regulations, a French energy expert says. About the speaker Magali Dreyfus has been a resear...

Since the early 20th century, emerging Asia has been subjected to the ebb and flow of lending from advanced economies. Since then the region has become more integrated into the global financial market, which has been exposed to the risk of capital flow reversals. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, capital has flowed into emerging economies, especially in Asia, in search of highe...

Poverty among the elderly in developing countries such as India is on the rise as the traditional extended family unit dissolves, fertility rates decline, migration to urban jobs rises, and government attempts to improve aged care have left many falling through the gaps. A small minority of workers in the formal sector are secure, but the vast majority of informal sector workers face poverty in th...

It’s been nearly a decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, and world economic growth rates are almost back where they were after a long, painful but instructive haul, and both developed and emerging economies have added a lot to their financial tool kits. The International Monetary Fund predicts growth in developed countries will drop from the pre-crisis 2.2 percent to 1.5 percent, and in e...

Parents in developing Asia tend to spend more on sons but receive higher returns from daughters, turning on its head an age-old belief that sons—not daughters—take care of their aging parents. This is true in the People’s Republic of China, where children are expected to help their parents based on Confucian philosophy, which values filial piety and altruism. Data show that investments in daughter...

Low-skilled workers in Viet Nam are hardest hit by market reforms and technology, with efficiency coming at the cost of jobs. Exposure to foreign markets and access to digital technologies raise demand for different types of skills, and while it has been good for the economy, more and more workers are being left behind. Read the transcript http://bit.ly/2iiGGkd Read the original report https://www...

Asia and the Pacific are home to 4.3 billion people, and half the world’s urban population, with 120,000 people moving to cities every day, creating daily demand for 20,000 affordable homes. Some cities, where housing is scarce and costly because they don’t have enough land or they’re where the jobs are concentrated, find it hard to provide enough public housing for a continuously rising urban pop...

Peer-to-peer lending is an emerging form of finance enabled by the Internet, matching investors with borrowers to get around rigid bank requirements faced by small and medium-sized enterprises—SMEs—and start-ups. Borrowers apply to a peer-to-peer—P2P—platform of investors. The platform assesses the borrower’s credit risk and gives a credit score based on the platform’s own credit rating model. Inv...

The idea of sharing future tax revenues with private investors is being promoted by the Asian Development Bank Institute—the ADBI—in Tokyo to help finance the region’s huge demand for infrastructure. But Naoyuki Yoshino, the dean of the institute, warns that future revenues need to be sustained for such financing to succeed in the longer term. Japanese private railway companies played a major role...

Remittances to developing countries in Asia help improve their economies with the net gains from exporting labor, and improve the lives of the poor people forced to work overseas—often for decades—because jobs are lacking at home. A small gain in the contribution of remittances to gross domestic product has led to huge declines in poverty in 10 developing countries, notably Bangladesh, India, Nepa...

Economic corridors forming around the Greater Mekong Subregion have opened the way to greater development as better infrastructure leads to improved roads and bridges between neighbors. The corridors are boosting economic growth in the GMS, and promoting intraregional trade and investment for Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar, Viet Nam, Thailand, and Yunnan Province and the Guanx...

Ha Noi, the Vietnamese capital, is renowned for its congested traffic. The government wants to build a third ring road around the city. But it doesn’t have enough money for such a major project, with two other ring roads already under way. Some of the construction is being funded on a BOT basis—build, operate, transfer, whereby the investor constructs and maintains the ring road and gets the toll...

Think tanks try to influence the powerful—people who hold government office and make decisions—by independently speaking the truth and not being afraid to do so. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, says that doesn’t seem to be enough these days. Read the transcript http://bit.ly/2kfLNSX Watch the complete presentation http://bit.ly/...

Japanese banks, insurance companies, and pension funds are investing in the US and other financial markets, due to the low or even negative interest rates at home. But their demand is pushing up the price of hedging, so when their dollars get converted back into yen, they lose money along the way. Robert McCauley, senior adviser at the Bank for International Settlements, told the audience at the A...

As the People’s Republic of China — the PRC — develops its “Go Global” suite of policies, it has expanded international capacity cooperation as a way to adjust to the “new normal” of low industrial growth. It’s a novel approach to overcapacity — where an industry is capable of building or producing more than it can sell — which was caused in the PRC by the 2008–2009 spending stimulus that flooded...

Obesity and overweight are among the main risk factors of noncommunicable diseases that kill millions of people worldwide. How much do these diseases cost health systems and economies? In the United States, every obese person spends about $2,741 a year for additional health care. In Japan, overweight and obesity cost $1,537 a person. US businesses spend about $66 billion because of the absenteeism...

Developing country economies are proving to be a competitive market for investment in local bonds because they offer relatively high yields and long maturities, which limit the risk of fluctuations in the US dollar, although not the risk to the developing economy. The lessons of the Asian financial crisis 20 years ago have shown that the movement of capital can be a gamble. The reality of internat...

Coal as an energy source in power plants will continue to increase in ASEAN and East Asia in the coming decades in the absence of a viable energy alternative, stoking fears of an upsurge in carbon dioxide emissions and greenhouse gases. Signals coming from Washington of lessened concern in the US over pollution issues, and President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate cha...