Suchergebnisse

Infrastructure plays a key role in promoting and sustaining rapid economic growth. Properly designed infrastructure can also make growth more inclusive by sharing its benefits with poorer groups and communities, especially by connecting remote areas and small and landlocked countries to major business centers. Even if the Asia-Pacific region has witnessed progress in infrastructure development, the growth of infrastructure lags behind its economic growth, and also behind international standards of infrastructure quantity and quality. Inadequate infrastructure can hamper the potential economic growth of Asian countries, weaken their international competitiveness, and adversely affect their poverty reduction efforts. The circumstances and effects of the recent economic and financial crisis provide a number of reasons to further develop national and regional infrastructure in Asia. Among these reasons is that regional infrastructure enhances competitiveness and productivity, which could help in economic recovery and in sustaining growth in the medium to long-term. Regional infrastructure also helps increase standard of living and reduce poverty by connecting isolated places and people with major economic centers and markets, narrowing the development gap among Asian economies. This paper estimates the need for infrastructure investment, including energy, transport, telecommunications, water, and sanitation during 2010-2020, in order to meet growing demands for services and facilitate further rapid growth in the region. By using top-down and bottom-up approaches, this paper provides a comprehensive estimate of Asia's need for infrastructure services. The estimates show that developing countries in Asia require financing of US$776 billion per year for national (US$747 billion) and regional (US$29 billion) infrastructure during 2010-2020 to meet growing demand.

Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of a country also increases the capacities to get out of a crisis. For getting out of a crisis, however, an important additional general condition must be fulfilled: the economy must increase its international competitiveness to assure growth, the only way out of a crisis. Building up a sound financial position and a competitive private sector, therefore, should be a pre-crisis policy. It relates to the public sector as well as the financial institutions. Once a crisis has erupted in an unsound financial environment there is no chance to escape a crisis sustainably avoiding a painful process. The blueprint for getting out of a crisis suggests a complex policy approach. The private financial sector must undergo structural reforms (in reality closing down or downscaling unsound institutions) and the government must apply fiscal austerity measures to reduce public debt, regaining credibility and by this creating new fiscal options for counteracting crisis effects. Labour costs can be reduced by increasing the labour market flexibility (e.g. by easier hiring and firing and higher wage spreads especially towards the lower wage scale) and by measures directly reducing labour costs. The result of such measures will be an increase of unemployment and of felt unemployment risks by large population groups as well as general real income losses from labour. The fiscal austerity measures in addition and in short term will reduce economic activities and thus aggravate the social problems. These negative social effects of getting out of a crisis are the most crucial and controversial policy issue. People and their interest organizations to a greatly varying extent will accept or refuse.