World Bank East Asia and Pacific Regional Report
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Known for their economic success and dynamism, countries in the East Asia and Pacific region must tackle an increasingly complex set of challenges to continue on a path of sustainable development. Learning from others within the region and beyond can help identify what works, what doesn’t, and why, in the search for practical solutions to these challenges. This regional flagship series presents analyses of issues relevant to the region, drawing on the global knowledge and experience of the World Bank and its partners. The series aims to inform public discussion, policy formulation and development practitioners’ actions to turn challenges into opportunities. Titles in this series comprise the key research output of the World Bank's East Asia and Pacific regional unit and undergo extensive internal and external review.
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Publication
Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-20)Countries in middle-income East Asia and the Pacific were already experiencing serious learning deficits prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-related school disruptions have only made things worse. Learning poverty -- defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text -- is as high as 90 percent in several countries. Several large Southeast Asian countries consistently perform well below expectations on adolescent learning assessments. This report examines key factors affecting student learning in the region, with emphasis on the central role of teachers and teaching quality. It also analyzes the role education technologies, which came into widespread use during the pandemic, and examines the political economy of education reform. The report presents recommendations on how countries can strengthen teaching to improve learning and, in doing so, can enhance productivity, growth, and future development in the region. -
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The Innovation Imperative for Developing East Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-02-23)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. -
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A Resurgent East Asia: Navigating a Changing World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019)East Asia has been a paragon of global development success. The dramatic transformation of the region over the past half century—with a succession of countries having progressed from low-income to middle-income and even to high-income status—has been built on what has come to be known as the “East Asian development model.” A combination of policies that fostered outward-oriented, labor-intensive growth while strengthening basic human capital and providing sound economic governance has been instrumental in moving hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into economic security. Yet East Asia’s economic resurgence remains incomplete. More than 90 percent of its people now live in 10 middle-income countries, many of which can realistically aspire to high-income status in the next generation or two. But these countries are still much less affluent and productive than their high-income counterparts. Even as the region’s middle-income countries attempt to move up to high-income status, they confront a rapidly changing global and regional economic environment. Slowing growth in global trade and shifts in its patterns, rapid technological change, and evolving country circumstances all present challenges to sustaining productivity growth, fostering inclusion, and enhancing state effectiveness. A Resurgent East Asia: Navigating a Changing World is about how policy makers across developing East Asia will need to adapt their development model to effectively address these challenges in the coming decade and sustain the region’s remarkable development performance. -
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Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-03-14)More children are going to school, staying in school for longer, and learning than ever before in East Asia and Pacific (EAP). During the past 50 years, a group of countries in EAP have successfully transformed their economies by investing in the continuous upgrading of 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 increased their demand for them. Yet the success of these high performing systems has not been replicated throughout the region. Hundreds of millions of students in the region are still in school but not learning, and roughly two of three students in EAP remain in school systems struggling to escape from the global learning crisis, or whose performance is likely poor. Most students in these systems fail to reach basic levels of proficiency in key subjects, and are greatly disadvantaged because of it. This report focuses on the experiences of countries in the region that were able to expand schooling and learning and showcases countries that have managed to successfully pursue education reforms at scale. By examining these experiences, it provides both diagnoses and detailed recommendations for improvement not only for education systems within EAP but for countries across the globe. In EAP, the impressive record of success in education in some developing 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 learning and suggests how countries can raise learning outcomes through a framework of five essential domains and their associated elements. -
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Riding the Wave: An East Asian Miracle for the 21st Century
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018)Developing East Asia has led the way in showing how rapid and broadly shared growth can lift millions out of poverty. And, as this book shows, the region has achieved even more: the wave of prosperity across the region since the 1980s has lifted three out of five of its citizens into economic security, where their risk of falling into poverty is minimal. Alongside this, a solid middle class has emerged in most countries. But these successes do not guarantee that inclusive growth--growth that reduces poverty and delivers upward mobility and economic security for all--is assured. The region has become more diverse, with progress varying across countries and extreme poverty increasingly concentrated among specific groups. Roughly a fifth of the region's population still remains at risk of falling into poverty and prospects for upward mobility are seen as increasingly elusive across the income distribution, reflecting a growing concentration of income and wealth and limited access to basic social services. Challenges old and new, including rapid aging and less certain growth prospects, are also increasing the premium on economic security for all. Riding the Wave is about how countries across the region can effectively confront these challenges and achieve inclusive growth. -
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Live Long and Prosper: Aging in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC, 2016)This book discusses the societal and public policy challenges and reform options for the East Asia and Pacific countries as they address aging. The book aims to strike a balance between optimism and pessimism over aging. On the one hand, the impacts of aging on growth, labor markets, and public spending need not represent the unavoidable catastrophe sometimes feared. On the other hand, minimizing the downside risks of aging and ensuring healthy and productive aging will require proactive public policy, political leadership, and new mindsets across society. -
Publication
East Asia Pacific at Work : Employment, Enterprise, and Well-being
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-05-07)The unprecedented progress of East Asia Pacific is a triumph of working people. Countries that were low-income a generation ago successfully integrated into the global value chain, exploiting their labor-cost advantage. In 1990, the region held about a third of the world’s labor force. Leveraging this comparative advantage, the share of global GDP of emerging economies in East Asia Pacific grew from 7 percent in 1992 to 17 percent in 2011. Yet, the region now finds itself at a critical juncture. Work and its contribution to growth and well-being can no longer be taken for granted. The challenges range from high youth inactivity and rising inequality to binding skills shortages. A key underlying issue is economic informality, which constrains innovation and productivity, limits the tax base, and increases household vulnerability to shocks. Informality is both a consequence of stringent labor regulations and limited enforcement capacity. In several countries, de jure employment regulations are more stringent than in many parts of Europe. Even labor regulations set at reasonable levels but poorly implemented can aggravate the market failures they were designed to overcome. This report argues that the appropriate policy responses are to ensure macroeconomic stability, and in particular, a regulatory framework that encourages small- and medium-sized enterprises where most people in the region work. Mainly agrarian countries should focus on raising agricultural productivity. In urbanizing countries, good urban planning becomes critical. Pacific island countries will need to provide youth with human capital needed to succeed abroad as migrant workers. And, across the region, it is critical to ‘formalize’ more work, to increase the coverage of essential social protection, and to sustain productivity. To this end, policies should encourage mobility of labor and human capital, and not favor some forms of employment - for instance, full-time wage employment in manufacturing - over others, either implicitly or explicitly. Policies to increase growth and well-being from employment should instead reflect and support the dynamism and diversity of work forms across the region. -
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Well-being from Work in the Pacific Island Countries
(Washington, DC, 2014)In the Pacific island countries, which are small and far from world markets, labor mobility represents the most significant and substantial opportunity for overcoming geographic constraints on employment. This report presents a brief overview of employment challenges in small Pacific island countries and recommendations for addressing them. The report contributes to an ongoing World Bank analytical program examining the linkages between employment and well-being around the world, begun with the World Development Report 2013: jobs. Discussion in this report relates to Pacific island states, with populations of significantly less than one million, including Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Republic of Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. Economic growth and diversification has been very limited in these countries because of the barriers imposed by smallness and distance, and these barriers will not be quickly overcome. This report provides five priorities that are likely to be broadly applicable to the unique group of countries. First, stakeholders' expectations about the trajectory of development will need to be realistic. Second, the volume of international labor mobility should be increased through the erosion of regulatory barriers and investment in transferable human capital. Third, governments can work to harness the positive potential of urbanization through investment in improved rural services, connective infrastructure, and improved urban administration. Fourth, productive public spending can be used as a mechanism for creating new employment opportunities. Finally, policies can ensure that natural resource industries provide a sustainable source of employment creation. -
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Toward Gender Equality in East Asia and the Pacific : A Companion to the World Development Report
(Washington, DC, 2012-10)In recent decades, women across the globe have made positive strides toward gender equality. Literacy rates for young women and girls are higher than ever before, while gender gaps in primary education have closed in almost all countries. In the last three decades, over half a billion women have joined the world's labor force (World Bank 2011c). Progress toward gender equality in East Asia and the Pacific has been similarly noteworthy. Most countries in the region have either reached or surpassed gender parity in education enrollments. Health outcomes for both women and men have improved significantly. Female labor force participation rates in the region are relatively high. Yet, despite considerable progress in this economically dynamic region, gender disparities persist in a number of important areas, particularly in access to economic opportunity and in voice and influence in society. For policy makers in East Asian and Pacific countries, closing these gender gaps represents an important challenge to achieving more inclusive and effective development. The East Asia and Pacific Region's significant economic growth, structural transformation, and poverty reduction in the last few decades have been associated with reduced gender inequalities in several dimensions. But growth and development have not been enough to attain gender equality in all its dimensions. This report clarifies empirically the relationship between gender and development and outlines an agenda for public action to promote gender equality in East Asian and Pacific countries. -
Publication
Putting Higher Education to Work : Skills and Research for Growth in East Asia
(World Bank, 2012)A fundamental question facing East Asia, especially its low- and middle income economies, is how to sustain or even accelerate the growth of recent decades. From 1950 to 2005, for example, the region's real income per head rose sevenfold. With aging populations, these economies will need to derive an increasing share of growth from productivity improvements rather than from physical factor accumulation to drive growth. The book argues that higher education is failing to deliver skills for growth and research for innovation because of widespread disconnects between higher education institutions and other skill and research users and providers. These disconnects undermine the very functioning of the higher education system. The main assumption of the report is that to deliver labor market skills to higher education graduates, these institutions: (a) must have characteristics that are aligned with what employers and employees need; and (b) must be well connected among themselves and other skills providers. Similarly, to deliver research that can enhance innovation and productivity, higher education institutions need to have a strong role in research provision and have strong links with firms and other research providers.