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Despite remarkable growth during the last decade, Asia and the Pacific still faces extensive basic infrastructure needs. Furthermore, to cope up with the reduced export demand from advanced economies arising out of the ongoing financial crisis, the region needs to enhance its connectivity through developing transport infrastructure at the national and regional level to rebalance its growth towards regional demand through enhancing intraregional trade. However, building massive transport infrastructure will have profound implications on environment and climate change at the national, regional and global levels as well as on scarce energy resources. This paper presents the needs and benefits of transport connectivity and financing requirement of Asian economies during 2010-2020; and analyzes the major challenges and prospects in developing sustainable transport connectivity. Finally, the paper provides policy recommendations on what the region can do to meet these challenges.

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian crisis and the ongoing financial crisis of 2008-2009 suggest that maintaining financial sector stability through reduction of vulnerability is highly crucial. The world is now witnessing an unprecedented systemic financial crisis originated from USA in September 2008 together with a deep worldwide economic recession, particularly in developed countries of Europe and North America. This calls for devising and using on a regular basis an appropriate and effective monitoring and policy formulation system for detecting and addressing vulnerabilities leading to crisis. This paper proposes a macroprudential/financial soundness monitoring, analysis and remedial policy formulation system that can be used by most developing countries with or without crisis experience as well as developed countries with limited data. It also discusses a process for identifying, and compiling a set of leading macroprudential indicators/financial soundness indicators. An empirical illustration using Philippines data is presented.