This publication is a history of the partnership between Indonesia and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). When Indonesia became a founding member of the bank in 1966, the country faced daunting challenges. In the five decades that passed, both Indonesia and ADB have evolved in remarkable ways. Indonesia developed rapidly through the late 1990s yet faced a difficult time of adjustment after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998. The country has since resumed growth in the last decade. For its part, ADB has widened its activities in Indonesia, transforming from a project-oriented bank into a broad-based development institution. This effective partnership reflects Indonesia’s success in working with the international community in the past 50 years.

Prior to the COVID-19 shock, the key challenge facing policymakers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia region was how to generate strong, sustainable, job-rich, inclusive growth. Post-COVID-19, this challenge has only grown given the additional reduction in fiscal space due to the crisis and the increased need to support the recovery. The sizable state-owned enterprise (SOE) footprint in the region, together with its cost to the government, call for revisiting the SOE sector to help open fiscal space and look for growth opportunities.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play significant roles in developing economies in Asia and SOE performance remains crucial for economy-wide productivity and growth. This book looks at SOEs in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, and Viet Nam, which together present a panoramic view of SOEs in the region. It also presents insights from the Republic of Korea on the evolving role of the public sector in various stages of development. It explores corporate governance challenges and how governments could reform SOEs to make them efficient drivers of the long-term productivity-induced growth essential to Asia's transition to high-income status.

Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.