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Almost like an audience-customized appendix to the World Bank's East Asia and Pacific Update November 2009, the live online chat held last Thursday by the regional Chief Economist, Vikram Nehru, and the lead author of the report, Ivailo Izvorski, answered a good number of questions in detail.

From diversifying Cambodia's economy to the right moment to suspend governments' stimulus packages, Vikram and Ivailo also touched on the effect of a weak US dollar in East Asian economies, on the challenges to generate domestic growth in export-dependent economies, and on the risks of inflation and asset price bubbles in the region, among others. Take a look at the transcript.

As part of its regular monitoring of the corporate sector in Southeast Asia, the World Bank economic team I am part of in Thailand has been working on a short case study of supply chains of Japanese multinational companies (MNCs) in the electrical and electronics (E&E) industry. We wanted to hear directly from firms about how the crisis affected them, how they were able to adjust so quickly to the drop in demand, what the rebound looked like, and what were the prospects going forward to upgrade along the value chain. I have learned a great deal from these interviews, and have become convinced that supply chains are central to understanding the current crisis in Thailand and East Asia more generally.

Some facts: the crisis had a disproportionate impact on manufacturing. In Thailand, manufacturing represents about 40 percent of GDP, but contractions in manufacturing value added have accounted for about 75 percent of the contraction of headline GDP. Within manufacturing, the auto and E&E industries account for the bulk of the contraction. Most of the output in those industries is exported, and more than three-fourths of the decline in Thai exports during the crisis was due to falls in shipments from the auto and E&E industries. My conclusion is that the magnitude of the crisis in Thailand has been driven primarily by these two industries.

The investment climate is the fundamental socio-economic framework in which firms operate – the macroeconomic and trade policies they face, the labor and financial markets in which they recruit and raise money, the available infrastructure and imposed regulations, as well as all other areas of public policy impacting on private business.

In Thailand, the uncertain political situation since 2006 has negatively affected the country’s economy. The Productivity and Investment Climate Survey, which was fielded in 2007 at a time of great political instability and policy uncertainty, clearly reflected the pessimistic views of business managers. One interesting finding of the recently released Thailand Investment Climate Assessment Update is that instability and economic policy uncertainty became major issues – firms that perceived it a major or severe obstacle doubled from one-third in 2004 to two-thirds in 2007.

So much is being written about climate change. The heat is on, so to speak, to find new solutions to increasingly dire predictions from ever more detailed data and refined models. Many conservationists are setting great store by the promise afforded by RED (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation) and REDD (add Degradation). It is only a few more months before we learn whether the leaders of the world reach agreement of whether to move forward and unlock the money which could – forest governance permitting – cause a major boost to the funding and rationale for forest conservation.

Meanwhile, a new World Bank report has revealed that conservationists have actually been doing climate change projects all along; they just hadn’t realized it. New technological fixes aren’t essential to taking positive action.