In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Last week, the Asian Development Bank released its annual “Asian Development Outlook” report for 2013, with Asia’s success story of unprecedented growth in the last decades forecast to grow by 6.6 percent in 2013 and 6.7 percent in 2014.

> More

Over the last several decades, Asia has become increasingly integrated with the rest of the world, its rapid development driven largely by exports to the United States and European Union. Yet, as the world’s main economic arteries shift eastward, intra-regional integration within Asia still lags behind.

> More

When President Obama made his first post-election international trip last month to Southeast Asia, his message was clear: as Asia becomes the driver of global politics in the coming decades, the U.S. is strategically reorienting its presence in the region. But the U.S. is not the only one that recognizes a need for reorientation – Asia itself does too.

> More

My colleague Michelle Chang recently blogged about the promises of mobile money for Asia. It’s true that in many countries, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where banking infrastructure is limited, mobile money represents a potential solution for the hundreds of millions of individuals who remain unbanked…

> More

Global economic recovery in 2012 remains tenuous, with the World Bank recently downgrading its forecast for this year’s global growth from 3.6 percent to 2.5 percent. This slide in expectations and persistently high unemployment rates in many countries has sparked a resurgence of protectionist tendencies toward trade. These tendencies are couched in the language of “bringing jobs back,” while tariffs are euphemistically coined as “flexibility” needed to protect domestic producers. South Asia has suffered for decades from a low level of intraregional cooperation, both politically and economically.

> More

Female entrepreneurs in Bangladesh represent a miniscule percentage of business owners (0.05 percent), according to The Asia Foundation’s 2010 firm-level survey results. Issues of concern to women business owners, such as difficulties in accessing information on regulations…

> More

In 2011, Asia grappled with a host of devastating shocks, both natural and man-made. As challenging and economically harsh as they have been, they have provided an opportunity for Asia’s emerging economies to dramatically assert their economic resilience and regional influence.

> More

In a recent edition of the Himalaya Post Anil Shah, CEO of Mega Bank – one of Nepal’s largest commercial banks – wrote an op-ed that laid out five pillars of sustainable economic development for Nepal.

> More

One year ago in this blog, Asia Foundation chief economist Bruce Tolentino expressed “cautious optimism” about the prospects for global recovery and Asian growth in 2010. His positive prediction for Asia was more than fulfilled, in spite of a dispiriting lag in U.S. recovery and severe economic crises in the Eurozone. In 2010, Asia’s diverse [...]

> More

South Asia has seen remarkable economic growth since the 1980s, when the region began to adopt pro-growth policies such as foreign investment liberalization, privatization, and the dismantling of onerous business regulations. Since the mid-1980s, South Asia experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.6 percent in its per capita Gross National Income (GNI). As a [...]

> More