This working paper from the ODI suggests Asian countries are emerging as leaders in clean energy with new business models that meet the needs of poor people within poor countries. Countries in the region are also highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A focus on low emission paths to sustainable development represents an investment in a future with major long-term commercial benefits for many members of the AIIB.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a new actor in international development finance led by developing countries to scale up investment in infrastructure. It has an opportunity to establish a new approach to infrastructure investment that prioritises renewable energy, climate resilience and sustainable development. The report proposes concludes that AIIB’s investments can help expand markets for renewable energy, and change the narrative around the emphasis of China’s overseas investments as one focused on clean sustainable development, rather than resource extraction.

Asia and the Pacific is a dynamic region. Regional megatrends, such as urbanization, economic and trade integration and rising incomes and changing consumption patterns, are transforming its societies and economies while multiplying the environmental challenges.

These environmental challenges range from growing greenhouse gas emissions, poor air quality, land use change, pressure on marine ecosystems, biodiversity loss and increasing demand for resources, such as energy and water. These megatrends are already shaping the future patterns of resource use and defining who benefits the most and who loses. A basic premise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is that trade-offs between environmental protection, shared prosperity and social progress can no longer be viewed as acceptable.

Aligning these trends with sustainable development requires political will and action to reshape the relationships between the economy, society and the environment. This report examines four critical determinants of the relationships between these three dimensions of sustainable development as targets for fundamental transformations—in social justice, resource efficiency, investment flows and economic structures.

This report is an output of the Himalayan Climate Change Adaptation Programme (HICAP). The aim of this report is to present downscaled climate scenarios in a relevant, understandable and illustrative manner for a diverse group of end-users and stakeholders, including other HICAP research components decision-makers at different levels. This report is based on dynamically downscaled temperature and precipitation projections for 8 different domains in the Hindu-Kush Himalayas. It uses the HICAP model (the WRF model, driven by the NorESM GCM model) for the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. Comparing model results with local observations for a reference period (1996-2005, the output was corrected for various under- and overestimations. For each domain, projections for periods 1996-2005, 2010-2030, 2030-2050 and 2050-2080 are presented a) in figures relevant for local users and decision makers, b) in a simplified text summing up the projections, and briefly discussing them in relation to potential impacts. This report provides highly relevant, locally specific results for the HICAP region, and relates these to geographical variations within each domain across the Himalayas. No other models and projections have been used in this report, and the HICAP model results should be compared with other sources of information for a final assessment of local climate change and impacts. The usability of the report extends beyond the HICAP project: the model-adjustment method, aimed at showing how to make projections realistic and relevant at the local level, the ease of the calculations and the guided interpretations of the figures and projections can serve as a guide to model use and presentations anywhere, provided the availability of a minimal amount of observations to compare and adjust larger scale model outputs to local climate observations for a certain reference period.

The concept of Blue Economy is emerging as a new narrative on productive and sustainable engagement with the vast development opportunities that oceanic resources offer. The important sectors of Blue Economy are fisheries, sea-minerals including oil and gas, ports and shipping, marine tourism, marine biotechnology, deep-sea mining, and transport and logistics.

It is believed that by undertaking Blue Economy initiative countries would be able to achieve high economic growth and maintain healthy balance between resource use and its renewability. However, there are few attempts to estimate the gains of Blue Economy. This assumes importance in the light of the fact that the world faces the challenge of restoring a healthy balance between the ambition of high economic growth and the goal of environmental sustainability. With the launch of SDGs, concerns are emerging in favour of sustainable use of natural resources especially in the context of growth-centric development models. In fact the oceans and the ocean related activities are viewed as the greatest source of growth in the post-recession period.

This report presents the synthesis of various conceptual and methodological issues relating to blue economy and the importance of this paradigm to the overall social and economic progress of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) countries. Since there exist ambiguities over the coverage of blue economy sectors and data availability, empirical estimates of the size of blue economy and related indicators are avoided here.

Presently, the challenges before the South Asian countries are to identify the ways and means of achieving regional integration on a fast track basis. The move from SAPTA (South Asian Preferential Trading Arrangement) to SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area) and now the proposal for South Asia Economic Union is a pragmatic move towards the next stage of cooperation. South Asian countries need to move further from trade liberalization measures alone to regional investment cooperation strategy, production integration, and technology cooperation. In the economic union and common market, macro- economic coordination also assumes greater significance.

The theme of the 7th SAES was “Towards South Asia Economic Union”. Several eminent scholars from India and abroad presented research papers at this Summit, and discussed a number of key issues that are relevant from the point of view of deepening South Asian integration. What emerges out of the deliberations is that the creation of South Asian Economic Union (SAEU) would prove to be a milestone in the regional cooperation efforts. The selected papers of the Summit are now presented in a single volume which will become a valuable reference for scholars and researchers as well. The papers of this volume also provide important policy lessons.

Papers include:

• South Asia Economic Union: Challenges and Tasks Ahead 
• Challenges to Regional Services Integration in South Asia Services Trade in South Asia: An Assessment
• Strengthening South Asia Value Chain: Prospects and Challenges
• Potential and Prospects of Strengthening Transport Connectivity for Regional Economic Integration in Southern Asia
• Connectivity for the South Asia Economic Union
• Stimulating Intra-Regional Investment in SAARC: Is a Regional Investment Agreement the Way Forward?
• Payment Systems to Facilitate South Asian Integration
• Post-2015 Agenda and Regional Cooperation in South Asia
• Regional Integration and the Post-2015 Framework: A South Asian Perspective

With the Tenth WTO Ministerial Conference in Nairobi, the efforts for trade liberalisation and strengthening of multilateral trading arrangement have come to a full circle. What started in 1995 with graduation from GATT to WTO has come to a point where several challenges for multilateralism are clearly discernible. As a result, it is not surprising that the usual excitement for WTO ministerial meeting is missing this time. The demand to close the Doha Development Round has triggered a deep sense of pessimism across low income and other developing countries. They have also been left outside the Mega-Regionals groupings, which have emerged in all parts of the world. Therefore, lowering of ambition at WTO is a direct outcome of these arrangements.

Signing of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an unprecedented development in the annals of the economic history of the world. Along with TPP another three mega regionals, viz. TTIP, RCEP and FTAAP, have made significant headway in their negotiations, and are likely to be formed in the coming years. These four regional groupings are distinct from those of other existing regional grouping in terms of their content, scope and impact on the global economy. There is discussion about another four mega regionals namely, EU-ASEAN, EU-Japan, China-Japan-Korea FTA and Pacific Alliance, which have got similar features to be treated as mega regionals. UN (2015) has treated Trade in Services (TISA) and Tripartite Free Trade Agreement (TFTA) as mega regionals which can have a major hold over the global economic activities in the recent years.

Mega regionals have significant command over several important economic activities in the world economy. Their contributions are felt in several frontiers of economic activities including GDP, FDI, Foreign Exchange Reserves, Saving Ratios, Gross Fixed Capital Formation, etc. among others. In several mega regionals, simultaneous presence of members from developed and emerging countries are seen, stressing on different dimensions of their economic engagement. In many such cases, developed countries have shown their strong base in several macro-economic activities but lacking growth whereas emerging countries have shown their surging growth in these activities.

This is a synthesis report from the Social Protection in Asia (SPA) policy-research and network- building programme, 2007-2010, funded by the Ford Foundation and IDRC. It presents research findings and draws out policy lessons from the 11 research projects, with three key elements: tracking the politics that leads governments to invest in social protection agendas; showing social protection to be not purely a state activity or a civil society activity, but drawing on the strengths of both; and presenting our conscious efforts to study ourselves as researchers within research to policy pathways.

This rapid desk based study is commissioned by DFID. DFID is interested to identify evidence of factors that are deterring investment in renewable energy (RE) in most developing countries in Asia. In our understanding, DFID proposes to use this evidence, along with information on the opportunities and risks in this sector, to commission more indepth studies in the future. These different studies will support the scoping of the potential establishment of one or more investment platforms through which DFID could deploy investment capital in order to catalyse private investment in south and central Asia. It’s been proposed that the platform(s) should focus on clean energy, inclusive agribusiness and financial services.

This rapid study has been conducted based on the review of existing literature and related databases. As mandated, the study adopts a political economy assessment framework. Asia is the general focus. However, examples, wherever applicable, have been drawn only from a selected set of Asian nations. China and India have generally not been considered in this study. It is found that although most countries in developing Asia have RE potentials and plans for mainstreaming renewables in their energy systems, they have mostly under performed with regard to attracting investments and capacity build up in the RE sector. Given the existing scenario, these

This research revealed significant trade-offs among energy security, food security and ecosystem capacity in the Philippines, India and China. The preferred role of bioenergy for sustainable development reflects the social and economic concerns in the respective Asian countries, e.g. energy security and environmental condition in China, food security in India, and ecosystem degradation in the Philippines. Thus, policy should carefully weigh the impacts of bioenergy development on sustainability issues that are closely interlinked in an energy-food-ecosystem nexus.

[adapted from source]

This paper analyses how various preferential trading arrangements deal with agriculture liberalization and examines a few case studies highlighting the provisions on agriculture. It assesses the effect of preferential trade agreements on agriculture trade flows in the case of ASEAN. It finds that while the tariff reduction on all goods, including agriculture, in ASEAN provides a marked advantage from the MFN tariff rates, intra-ASEAN agriculture trade have not been all that significant. Most of the growth in the intra-ASEAN trade had come from trade in industry; and if total agriculture trade had expanded, much of it was due to trade outside the region.

The paper argues that AFTA, by original design, had not really been made to boost intraregional agriculture trade, but rather to facilitate the interindustry trade arising out of the vertically integrated network of manufacturing transnational corporations.

Economic integration in the European Union has, arguably, been one of the most significant developments in the global economy in the last half-century. Other regions in the world, to a greater or lesser degree, appear to be in quest of a similar goal – the integration of their regional economies. What lessons could they learn from the European Union experience? Specifically, as closer cooperation appears a clarion call at the level of Asian politicians, can East Asia learn some lessons from the European Union?

Many bilateral trade agreements between ASEAN and other East Asian economies have been negotiated, and some have been signed, but thus far have not yet delivered a true free trade area in the sense of zero tariffs for all products. What exist, at the moment, are a collection of preferential trade agreements rather than free trade agreements (FTAs). In the financial markets, regional integration is in an even more infantile state than in goods trade. At least, in trade in goods, multilateral and regional agreements forced tariffs and other trade barriers down and volumes of trade have shown growth. In the financial field, the region has yet to show bigger intraregional transactions, while capital markets have yet to deepen and a host of financial market barriers yet to come down. Each domestic economy remains highly protected by different regulations and restrictions on capital flows, as discussed later in this paper.

An advantage of the present East Asian situation is that being at the start of the process presents an opportunity to observethe experiences of other regional integration efforts, the European Union phenomenon in particular, and learn from both their positive achievements (and to imitate them) and negative experiences. Indeed, the European experience serves as a reference point for determining the policy requirements and operational aspects of regional integration process.

Using data from a quick survey of various rural (RFIs) and microfinance institutions (MFIs) in East Asia, the paper tries to find out how those institutions and their clientele have been affected by the global financial crisis, how they have coped with the ongoing crisis, and what they plan to do in the future to ensure the stability of the rural financial system and the continuing access of clients to financial services.

The microfinance sector in Asia continues to evolve with emphasis on efficiency and strong growth in outreach. The limited data from the quick survey validate the growth in loan portfolios and increase in the number of clients, with growth varying significantly by country depending on internal and external factors during the period before the global financial crisis. Impacts vary depending on external and internal factors faced by RFIs and MFIs. However, they continue to maintain a positive attitude and expect that business will pick up as a result of an increase in demand for loans to finance livelihood projects and various microenterprises. They are aware of the threats and opportunities brought about by the global financial crisis. The analysis leads to some lessons for policymakers, bank regulators, rural financial institutions, and microfinance institutions that are committed to provide inclusive financial services to member clients.

In July 1997, the Thai financial crisis broke out, which had strong contagion effects on the neighboring economies, including the Philippines. In fact, the Philippine peso was among the initial currencies subjected to heavy speculative attacks. However, the country was not as severely affected in that the currency crisis did not develop into a full blown financial and economic crisis. This was attributed to the structural reforms that had already been implemented, including financial sector reforms. And the consensus was that the Philippines would be among the first to recover from the regional crisis.

This paper looks at the contagion effects of the Asian crisis on the Philippine economy, the policy responses, and their social implications. In particular, the paper discusses the role of the financial sector in the evolution of the crisis. In Section II, the recent performance of the Philippine economy, the financial sector and the social sector is reviewed in order to better situate the Asian crisis and its contagion effects on the Philippines. Section III then looks at the economic and social impacts of the Asian crisis on the Philippines, as well as the government's policy responses. The government's social safety net programs are then discussed in Section IV. Finally, Section V presents some conclusions and the continuing policy issues.

With Southeast Asian countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Viet Nam experiencing the increasing occurrence of weather and climate-related hazards and disasters in recent years, some of which they commonly share due to their close proximity to each other, it thus becomes important for them to cooperate and coordinate with one another in addressing said hazards and disasters.

This policy note reviews the occurrence of disasters caused by weather and climate-related hazards in Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Viet Nam, and the socioeconomic damages that they have caused. The note aims to highlight the increasing incidence of natural disasters in these countries and suggest some recommendations for cooperative action among them, particularly in the forecasting of natural hazards.

The role of education in economic development is widely acknowledged. It increases the innovative capacity of an economy and facilitates the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of new ideas. With a higher quality higher education system, the Philippines would then be better placed to reap the well-documented economic benefits of an educated population. This policy note explores the potential of regional cooperation to improve the quality and availability of, and access to education.