This is an important and timely volume: important because ASEAN is an increasingly significant and influential regional and global actor; and timely because, as the 2015 ASEAN Economic Community target approaches, what is needed is a sympathetic yet arms-length survey of the issues and challenges. ASEAN will miss some of the targets laid out in its AEC Blueprint, but the reader is left in no doubt that the ASEAN spirit is alive and well. The editors include a distinguished former Secretary General of ASEAN and the leading academic analyst of ASEAN economic cooperation. They and their co-editors are to be congratulated for soliciting contributions from an outstanding and diverse group of authors, and then adding their highly authoritative commentary and analysis. A must read for anybody seriously interested in ASEAN.

One-quarter of the world’s school-age children live in East Asia and Pacific. During the past 50 years, some economies in the region have successfully transformed themselves by investing in the continuous upgrading of the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their workforce. Through policy foresight, they have produced graduates with new levels of knowledge and skills almost as fast as industries have increased their demand for skilled workers. Yet the success of these high-performing systems has not been replicated throughout the region. Tens of millions of students are in school but not learning, and as many as 60 percent of students remain in school systems that are struggling to escape from the global learning crisis or in systems where performance is likely poor. Many students in these systems fail to reach basic levels of proficiency in key subjects and are greatly disadvantaged because of it. Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific focuses on the experiences of economies in the region that have been able to expand schooling and learning and showcases those that have managed to pursue successful education reforms at scale. By examining these experiences, the report provides both diagnoses and detailed recommendations for improvement not only for education systems within East Asia and Pacific but also for countries across the globe. In East Asia and Pacific, the impressive record of success in education in some low- and middle-income countries is proof of concept that schooling in resource-constrained contexts can lead to learning for all. This report identifies the policies and practices necessary to ensure that students learn and suggests how countries can improve learning outcomes.

This publication provides updated statistics on a comprehensive set of economic, financial, social, and environmental measures as well as select indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report covers the 49 regional members of ADB. It discusses trends in development progress and the challenges to achieving inclusive and sustainable economic growth across Asia and the Pacific. This 52nd edition discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the challenges of meeting development targets, which needed urgent attention even before the global health crisis began. To put into practice the "leave no one behind" principle of the SDGs, the availability of more detailed and informative data is crucial. With the pandemic intensifying society's reliance on digital platforms for remote working and learning, as well as for shopping and entertainment, the 2021 report features a special supplement, Capturing the Digital Economy: A Proposed Measurement Framework and Its Applications, which is rooted in input-output analysis and uses readily available national accounts data. The study provides a sound basis on which to assess the relative importance of the digital economy in national and global production processes.

After a half century of transformative economic progress that moved hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, countries in developing East Asia are facing an array of challenges to their future development. Slowed productivity growth, increased fragility of the global trading system, and rapid changes in technology are all threatening export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing—the region’s engine of growth. Significant global challenges—such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic—are exacerbating economic vulnerability. These developments raise questions about whether the region’s past model of development can continue to deliver rapid growth and poverty reduction. Against this background, The Innovation Imperative in Developing East Asia aims to deepen understanding of the role of innovation in future development. The report examines the state of innovation in the region and analyzes the main constraints that firms and countries face to innovating. It assesses current policies and institutions, and lays out an agenda for action to spur more innovation-led growth. A key finding of the report is that countries’ current innovation policies are not aligned with their capabilities and needs. Policies need to strengthen the capacity of firms to innovate and support technological diffusion rather than just invention. Policy makers also need to eliminate policy biases against innovation in services, a sector that is growing in economic importance. Moreover, countries need to strengthen key complementary factors for innovation, including firms’ managerial quality, workers’ skills, and finance for innovation. Countries in developing East Asia would also do well to deepen their tradition of international openness, which could foster openness in other parts of the world. Doing so would help sustain the flows of ideas, trade, investment, and people that facilitate the creation and diffusion of knowledge for innovation.

Since its adoption in 2015, the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development has shaped not only international development cooperation but also the design of national trajectories for social and economic development. In tandem with other global agendas adopted that year (such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and UN Habitat’s New Urban Agenda) it remains the global and regional blueprint for sustainable development despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The term "localizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)" has been used to capture the importance of subnational governments for achieving national SDG agendas. However, there is little deeper analysis of the required nexus between fiscal, political, and legal arrangements for SNGs; their involvement in national policy arenas (which discuss and decide on national SDG strategies); and the need for locally disaggregated data systems on the one hand, and effective SDG localization strategies on the other hand. It is this aspect which the present publication explores in greater detail by using country examples and conceptual analyses. The text will be of interest to policymakers, scholars, students and practitioners in public policy and public administration, decentralization, and sustainable development, with a focus on the Asia and Pacific region. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO).

Until the 1990s, industrialization was the dominant development paradigm for the Asia-Pacific region. Since then, advanced services (finance, business or 'producer services', information and creative services) have become deeply embedded in the processes of economic growth and change in the region. This rapid tertiary expansion is fundamentally restructuring national and regional economies and urban form in line with the introduction of advanced production systems, national modernization programmes and the globalization strategies of governments. Services are being actively deployed as instruments of metropolitan reconfiguration and land use change. This book explores various aspects of the relationship between service industries and economic development in Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Australia and New Zealand. It provides new sector-oriented and regional and national perspectives on services and development.