This study represents a new generation of inquiry that attempts to gain a better understanding of smaller urban places in the remote and frontier regions in Southeast Asia. A set of intriguing hypotheses attempting to unravel the complicated relationships between population movements and employment opportunities as they relate to the growth of certain urban places and the rural hinterland have been posited. The study is aimed at illuminating the processes of urbanization and development in North Sumatra Province of Indonesia and the Central Visayas and Northern Mindanao regions of the Philippines.

The movement of people in Southeast Asia is an issue of increasing importance. Countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are now the origin of 8 percent of the world's migrants. These countries host only 4 percent of the world's migrants but intra-regional migration has turned Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand into regional migration hubs that are home to 6.5 million ASEAN migrants. However, significant international and domestic labor mobility costs limit the ability of workers to change firms, sectors, and geographies in ASEAN. This report takes an innovative approach to estimate the costs for workers to migrate internationally. Singapore and Malaysia have the lowest international labor mobility costs in ASEAN while workers migrating to Myanmar and Vietnam have the highest costs. Singapore and Malaysia's more developed migration systems are a key reason for their lower labor mobility costs. How easily workers can move to take advantage of new opportunities is important in determining how they fare under the increased economic integration planned for ASEAN. To study this question, the report simulates how worker welfare is affected by enhanced trade integration under different scenarios of labor mobility costs. Region-wide, worker welfare would be 14 percent higher if barriers to mobility were reduced for skilled workers, and an additional 29 percent if barriers to mobility were lowered for all workers. Weaknesses in migration systems increase international labor mobility costs, but policy reforms can help. Destination countries should work toward systems that are responsive to economic needs and consistent with domestic policies. Sending countries should balance protections for migrant workers with the needs of economic development.

"More and more, in Southeast Asia, low-skilled labor is expected to be mobile and job-seeking implies leaving. In factories, plantations, fields, extraction, commerce, services, and construction, a whole nebula of low-paid, mostly young, small-scale migrants allows the regional economy to function. This volume brings together a unique collection of bottom-up accounts of the work and life of locally mobile workers who are highly representative in their countries and throughout the region: contractual farmers in Laos, miners, young urban workers in services, construction workers in Indonesia, Filipino shoemakers, and Vietnamese factory workers. The chapters focus on these laborers' gendered ideas of work and life at large but also on the ideology of work they have constructed. In addition to telling these stories, the contributors analyze how ill-defined mobile work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness. In different ways, precarization is questioned as a specific gendered economic policy within neoliberal contexts. The workers' reflexive considerations of their makeshift life projects lead to descriptions of embodied forms of resilience and creativity, however diverse. Through interdisciplinary approaches, heightened attention is paid to the interaction between localities, moral economies, and global neoliberal politics"--Back cover

By now, planners everywhere know - more or less - what the ingredients of a sustainable city are, in theory. The problem is that only bits of solutions are being implemented in the cities that most need them, the majority of which are located in the Global South. This book examines issues related to policy transfer in urban transport planning in Southeast Asia. The metropolitan regions of four major capitals - Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Bangkok - are considered. The book assesses the in-bound and out-bound transfer of sustainable transport planning policies, concepts, and tools. The investigation focuses on who transfers policy and why, what elements of policy are transferred, in what direction and to what degree, and what barriers does transfer face. It also discusses how policy transfer processes in the transportation planning arena can be improved.

This book is the most up-to-date and authoritative work on Indonesias rural non-farm development characteristics and potential. The essays, by experts and well-known specialists in the field, emphasize the changing importance of off-farm income, employment contributions of small enterprises, the role of gender and mobility in entrepreneurial behaviour and the policy implications for rural non-farm enterprises. A unique feature is the use of case studies to provide insights and context for activities. The book is both a summary of current knowledge and a call for new inquiries on this critical theme.

Acknowledgements -- Overview -- Workers in southeast Asia are on the move -- Migration in ASEAN -- The determinants of migration in ASEAN and the importance of labor mobility costs -- The impacts of migration in ASEAN -- Trade integration and labor mobility in the ASEAN economic community -- Migration policy in the ASEAN region -- Reducing migration costs in ASEAN -- List of figures