Case studies, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, East Asia.

This book analyses how closer regional connectivity and economic integration between South Asia and Southeast Asia can benefit both regions. With a focus on the role played by infrastructure and public policies in facilitating this process, it provides a detailed and up-to-date discussion of issues, innovations, and progress. Country studies of national connectivity issues and policies cover Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, examining major developments in trade and investment, economic cooperation, the role of economic corridors, and regional cooperation initiatives. Thematic chapters explore investment in land and sea transport infrastructure, trade facilitation, infrastructure investment financing, supporting national and regional policies, and model-based estimates of the benefits of integration. They also identify significant opportunities for strengthening these integration efforts as a result of the recent opening up of Myanmar in political, economic, and financial terms. For the first time for these regions, the book employs a state-of-the-art computable general equilibrium (CGE) model incorporating heterogeneous firms to estimate the advantages of integration.Providing perspective on the latest thinking on integration policy, Connecting Asia is an essential resource for academics, policymakers, and business people alike.

Much of East Asia continues to grow rapidly, driven to a considerable extent by China. Urbanization is proceeding at pace. Demand for infrastructure services is increasing massively, particularly in cities. Much of the demand comes from the newly urbanized poor. Infrastructure has to meet their needs, but has also to continue to provide the underpinnings for the regionOCOs growth. The complexity of responding to these demands is greater than ever, and the cost of getting things wrong very high. Poorly conceived infrastructure investments today would have a huge environmental, economic, and social impact OCo and be very costly to fix later. Neglecting the infrastructure needs of people remaining in poor parts of East Asia OCo particularly in rural areas, and in isolated countries of the region; and failing to include them in growth, would also be costly, in human and political terms. This study is about East Asia, and itOCOs about infrastructure. ItOCOs about poverty and growth, and itOCOs about transport, water, sanitation, power, and telecommunications OCo both the infrastructure, and the infrastructure services. Infrastructure is only one part of the development challenge, but its impacts are among the most important. Connecting East Asia looks at the role that infrastructure has played in supporting East AsiaOCOs growth and looks ahead at what the challenges are for the future, and how to approach them."

Infrastructure is essential for development. This report presents a snapshot of the current condition of developing Asia's infrastructure---defined here as transport, power, telecommunications, and water supply and sanitation. It examines how much the region has been investing in infrastructure and what will likely be needed through 2030. Finally, it analyzes the financial and institutional challenges that will shape future infrastructure investment and development.

Abstract: This paper examines whether infrastructure investment has contributed to East Asia's economic growth using both a growth accounting framework and cross-country regressions. For most of the variables used, both the growth accounting exercise and cross-country regressions fail to find a significant link between infrastructure, productivity and growth. These conclusions contrast strongly with previous studies finding positive and significant effect for all infrastructure variables in the context of a production function study. This leads us to conclude that results from studies using macro-level data should be considered with extreme caution. The Authors suggest that infrastructure investment may have had the primary function of relieving constraints and bottlenecks as they arose, as opposed to directly encouraging growth.

This report analyzes the impact of the financial crisis on investment trends and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of private participation in infrastructure (PPI) in six East Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.