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East Asia & Pacific is facing some great development challenges today: urbanization, protection of the environment, the need to find renewable energy sources and many others. This site wants to create a conversation around those important issues. More »

All East Asia & Pacific

Higher education graduates in East Asia: Too few? Too many?

Submitted by Emmanuel Jimenez on Tue, 2010-05-18 18:26
East Asia and Pacific countries have more university graduates than ever, yet employers say they don't find the skills to match their needs.

The number of people with higher education credentials has never been higher in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), according to a new World Bank website on higher education.   Over the past two decades, the number of university graduates in the region has increased significantly.  In countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and China, the percent of tertiary level graduates in the workforce is now about 20%, double from what it was 15 to 20 years ago. 

At the same time, employers fret that they are not getting the skilled workers they need to compete in a global economy.  Investment climate assessments  report that 20% of employers feel that skills availabilities are a major impediment to business, as much as, if not more than, meeting onerous regulations.

Why has developing East Asia led the global economic recovery?

Submitted by Ivailo Izvorski on Tue, 2010-04-06 23:30

Only a few expected in late 2008 that East Asia would lead the world economy out of the crisis. Skeptics pointed to the continued dependence of the region on exports to advanced economies. And skeptics and believers alike were predicting that all countries in the region would rethink their growth models to focus more on domestic demand rather than exports and investment.

What a difference a year and a half makes. East Asia has recovered from the economic and financial crisis, with output, exports and employment mostly at pre-crisis levels. Leading the global economy, real GDP in developing East Asia is set to grow 8.7 percent in 2010, up from 7 percent in 2009, according to the World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific Update report launched today (and of which I’m the lead author, full disclosure here). The projected growth rate for 2010 is almost a percentage point higher than our own forecast made six months ago, and is higher than the 8.5 percent expansion recorded in 2008.

Haiti earthquake: Out of great disasters comes great opportunity

Submitted by Abhas Jha on Mon, 2010-01-18 01:33
A collapsed building in Port-au-Prince. Photo by IFRC/Eric Quintero under a Creative Commons license.

The scale and magnitude of the earthquake in Haiti has shocked, saddened and horrified us all. But there is a silver lining to this great tragedy. Looking back in history, great natural disasters are often a catalyst for huge, positive change.

The great fire of London in 1666 led to a massive rebuilding effort, better building regulations and, in the end, a safer, cleaner city that maintained the medieval street plan that is still visible, to some extent, today. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting discussion of how the impact of the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon led to the creation of a new metropolis with earthquake-proof buildings, wide thoroughfares and a sewer system. The massive reconstruction financing required after the great fire of Copenhagen of 1795 led to the creation, in 1797, of Kreditkassen for Husejere i Kjøbenhavn (The Credit Association of Copenhagen homeowners), the precursor of modern mortgage markets.

East Asia & Pacific: Risks to economic recovery from the return to business-as-usual in developed countries

Submitted by Ivailo Izvorski on Wed, 2010-01-13 11:57

The prediction season is in full swing, and prognosticators have, as usual, appended the warning that economic forecasts at this stage are subject to exceptional uncertainty.  Such exceptional uncertainty is always with us when looking ahead – there is always a fork in the road, no matter what the circumstances are. 

The nuance this year is that, while the recovery in East Asia will depend on prospects for the rest of the world, notably in the advanced economies, the outlook for those economies hinges on policies to address the causes of the financial crisis. Thus far, it’s clear that very little has been done to redress the regulatory issues that led to a near meltdown of the global financial system – while the rebound from the financial and economic crisis has been substantially stronger than anticipated only months earlier.  And these developments explain why opinions differ on the future path of regulatory reforms and their impacts.

Yet-to-be-released online mapping tool could make monitoring deforestation easy as Google

Submitted by James I Davison on Tue, 2010-01-05 20:58

We’ve written before about a climate-related effort in developing countries known as REDD – or Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation. So one of the outcomes during last month’s U.N. climate conference that I found particularly interesting was an announcement from Google.org. During the conference in Copenhagen, the search giant's philanthropic arm introduced the prototype for an online application that will allow monitoring of forests around the planet.

Apparently, some believed that the overall topic of REDD may have been one of the few bright spots during the two-week conference. To me, it seems like this forthcoming online monitoring tool is no exception – particularly because Google products are often innovative, easy to use and reliable.

The announcement generated quite bit of media buzz, and Google.org’s press release has a nice explanation of why the online application, likely available to the public some time this year, might be so significant:

Traditional forest monitoring is complex and expensive, requiring access to large amounts of satellite data, lots of hard drives to hold the data, lots of computers to process the data, and lots of time while you wait for various computations to finish. … Google supplies data, storage, and computing muscle. As a result, you can visualize forest change in fractions of a second over the web, instead of the minutes or hours that traditional offline systems require for such analysis.

 

Vote for climate change story to be presented during Copenhagen conference

Submitted by James I Davison on Sun, 2009-12-06 22:48

In a few hours, world leaders and representatives from up to 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the highly anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference, which starts on Monday and lasts for two weeks. While the deluge news reports, blog posts and online conversations on the meetings continue to crop up, one of the most interesting media initiatives of Copenhagen that I’ve seen is are awards for the best in-depth feature and investigative climate change journalism.

The Earth Journalism Awards, which are sponsored in part by the World Bank, started with more than 450 submissions from 100 countries that have been narrowed down to 15 finalists. Anyone with an Internet connection can vote for their favorites. The winning story will be presented to, as the site puts it, “a mixed audience of negotiators, climate change experts, activists and media representatives in Copenhagen on December 14 on the eve of the endgame negotiations.” That seems like a pretty significant prize to a journalist. (Read more about the competition here.)

You have until Dec. 9 to vote through Facebook, Twitter or the awards site. If nothing else, it’s worth checking out the list of finalists, which is made up of a nice collection of stories that cover a range of climate change topics from around the world – including two entries from the East Asia and Pacific region.

China leads rapid growth of online audiences in Asia

Submitted by James I Davison on Tue, 2009-12-01 14:19

The online population in Asian and Pacific countries grew by 22 percent last year. China led the growth with an incredible 31 percent increase – to 220 million – in total unique Web visitors. These latest numbers of the region’s explosive Internet growth are according to a report, released last month by Internet researcher comScore, measuring online audiences in the region and individual countries between September 2008 and 2009.

The report indicates that Internet audiences in Japan, India and South Korea also saw double-digit growth and that the Asia-Pacific region now has 41 percent – or 441 million people – of the global Internet audience. It’s interesting to see how quickly things have changed since the last time we wrote about an earlier report from comScore.

If you want to examine more of the report’s findings you can see the related press release, or download a presentation on the subject here. (Note: To download the slides, you have to provide them with your name and some contact info.)

I’ve pointed before to World Bank evidence that shows the Internet may lead to improved economic growth, job creation and good governance. What else do you think such increased connectivity could mean for development in the region?

Random Hacks of Kindness: software developers create and share code to tackle disaster relief

Submitted by Claudia Gabarain on Mon, 2009-11-30 01:06

A bunch of software programmers get together, listen to a list of desired projects formulated by aid, emergency, and development experts that would help tackle issues related to disaster relief, work for two days and the result is eleven applications that will allow users to easily report their status in the event of a disaster, locate family, provide data needed by emergency responders, or that will automatically process aerial images taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), among others.

Presentation of the microUAV image registration system (photo courtesy of Todd Huffman under a Creative Commons license).

This is what happened at the first "Random Hacks of Kindness" event in San Francisco, a hackathon that served as the basis of a global community of developers and subject matter experts that will work on development and reconstruction issues. The idea originated at a Crisis Camp barcamp held at the World Bank in Washington DC last May, when representatives from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agreed that some matters supersede competitive concerns and decided to cooperate and mobilize developer communities to create software that is openly shared with the international community to have a real impact on the field. The Bank led the partnership and it now includes NASA and SecondMuse as well.

Possible asset bubbles in Asia: how to avoid them?

Submitted by Louis Kuijs on Thu, 2009-11-19 23:43

Just as Asian economies started to recover from the global recession, policymakers and markets have started to worry about unwarranted asset price increases. While the worries are global, especially in the case of stock markets, the risks of asset prices bubbles seem particularly high in Asia, where abundant liquidity is driving up prices of all sorts of assets, from Hong Kong and Singapore real estate to Chinese art.

Where is the liquidity coming from? Capital inflows have received a lot of attention lately. Financial capital is flowing into Asia, attracted by the continent’s relatively good economic prospects. More important, for most economies, is a dramatic easing of domestic monetary conditions since late 2008 that has fueled domestic liquidity.

In part, the easing of monetary conditions in Asia was deliberate, a policy response to sharp weaker growth. However, some of the easing of monetary conditions was not deliberate. Economies with an exchange rate somewhat or completely fixed to the US dollar and fairly open capital markets are “importing” the loose US monetary policy. In some economies, those imported monetary conditions sit oddly with domestic economic conditions. In many Asian economies, spare capacity is much smaller than in the US and cyclical unemployment much lower.

New Google feature lets users quickly search World Bank development data

Submitted by James I Davison on Tue, 2009-11-17 11:24

If you haven’t already taken the time to do some development-related Googling after last week’s announcement that World Bank statistics are now available through the ubiquitous search engine’s public data tool, I’d suggest exploring the exciting new feature. Now, anyone can easily access 17 World Development Indicators by searching for them in Google. Give it a try by searching for the GDP of China or CO2 emissions of Indonesia or exports of Thailand – or another country and any of these indicators.

When you click on the search result, an interactive chart page shows you how the data have changed over time and allows you to compare to other countries (or the world). (You can also embed the chart, like the one below.) For example, take a look at how the GDP growth rate of China compares to Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines in the last 50 years.

To further explore the data, check out another nifty tool, also launched last week by the World Bank. DataFinder lets you research more about these development indicators and see how they look on an interactive map. Read more about DataFinder here.