Financing higher education in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand

August, 2012
Bruce Chapman
In recent decades Southeast Asian countries have enjoyed simultaneously rapid economic growth and a significant expansion of the higher education sector. This is not a coincidence: higher education both contributes to and is caused by economic growth. And as demand for human capital grows in middle-income Asian countries, enrollments and graduations can be expected to increase in the short and medium term.

Consumption in China: following the golden rule?

July, 2012
Yukon Huang
With China’s economy slowing faster than expected, Beijing is considering a variety of stimulus measures. Some favour investment projects and others insist on easing monetary policies, while the cautious push for a consumption-driven approach. But such hopes are tempered by the much-publicised decline in the share of consumption, from 50 per cent to below 35 per cent of GDP over the past 15 years. This trend is considered the clearest sign that China’s growth process is unbalanced, with consumption repressed and investment overdone.

Managing India-Pakistan trade relations

June, 2012
Ishrat Husain
Economic historians and analysts face a conundrum comprehending South Asia. Just some decades ago the region was a single large market — with goods, services, capital investment and skilled labour flowing freely, and the newly independent countries inheriting a common historical, legal, cultural and administrative background and well-linked infrastructure. But today South Asia is the least integrated region in the world. Meanwhile, East Asia, whose countries possess diverse backgrounds and relatively little in common historically, has become the world’s most integrated region after the EU. There are many explanations, but the political tension and rivalry between South Asia’s two major players, India and Pakistan, is one key reason.

Toward a functional Chiang Mai Initiative

May, 2012
Chalongphob Sussangkarn
The Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) is a regional foreign exchange liquidity support mechanism that developed as a result of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. The CMI was designed to be closely linked to the IMF, and later evolved into a multilateralised mechanism, the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM). A regional surveillance unit, the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), supports the CMIM. But AMRO is still in its infancy, and will need time to increase its effectiveness and gain market confidence.

Thailand’s economy still recovering from devastating floods

April, 2012
Bandid Nijathaworn
Thailand is emerging from one of the worst floods in history. The floods, which struck in the second half of last year, damaged key industries across the country, including agriculture and manufacturing, and brought on a sharp drop in output, with GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2011 dropping to negative 9 per cent. Such a large drop in output reduced Thailand’s annual GDP growth to 0.1 per cent, making last year one of its poorest for economic growth.

China’s expansion: best and worst case scenarios

March, 2012
Fan He
A newly released report by the World Bank and the Development Research Center (DRC), a prominent think tank in China, warned that by 2025 China’s economic growth rate would decline to an annual average of 5 per cent — a sharp fall from the 10 per cent average of the last 30 years. In a widely cited article published in 2011, Liu Shijin, the DRC’s deputy director, also predicted that the average growth rate would fall to 6.7 per cent for the period of China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020).
He Fan is Deputy Director at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is also Deputy Director at the Research Center for International Finance, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China’s economic rebalancing already underway

February, 2012
Yiping Huang
The international community, and particularly policy makers in the United States, put great expectations on the contribution that China can make to global economic recovery by re-balancing its economy through promoting consumption growth. The Chinese authorities broadly accept this priority and have put in place a number of policy measures that aim to achieve it.
Yiping Huang is Professor of Economics at Peking University and Professor at the China Economy Program, the Australian National University. He is also Chief Economist for Asia at Barclays Bank, Hong Kong and co-authored the report The Great Wave of Consumption Upgrading (January, 2012).

The Philippines: signs of economic improvement

January, 2012
Cesar Virata
The Philippines began 2011 with high expectations and optimism after the Aquino administration announced various reform-minded plans and programs. These included a vigorous anti-corruption campaign, plans for greater government transparency and accountability, a number of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for major infrastructure projects, social programs addressing poverty alleviation, and improved education and health programs.
Cesar Virata is Principal of C. Virata & Associates and is a former Prime Minister of the Philippines.

International financial crises and the ASEAN economies

December, 2011
Arief Ramayandi
The slow resolution of the European debt crisis has evolved into a liquidity problem which threatens the global financial system. And these long-drawn-out efforts to address the sovereign debt problems have heightened uncertainties about resolving the crisis and induced speculative activities, threatening the survival of many European banks. In an effort to contain financial disaster, central banks of the world’s major economies have taken a concerted emergency action to provide cheaper dollar funding to these troubled banks at the end of November 2011. Further, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) recently pledged readiness to act more aggressively in averting a deeper financial crisis.
Arief Ramayandi is an Economist at the Asian Development Bank. The views are solely of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian Development Bank.