ESCAP Repository (United Nations ESCAP)
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Infographics on road safety status in the Asia-Pacific region
No full textTransport plays a significant role in economic and social integration, by facilitating a wide range of social and economic interactions. However, road safety remains one of the major challenges for sustainable transport development. In the Asia-Pacific region, 97 per cent of all transport-related deaths are estimated to occur on roads. In 2019, 1.28 million and 720,588 road fatalities occurred globally and in the Asia-Pacific region, respectively. Road crashes are the seventh leading cause of fatality in low-income countries and the tenth in middle-income countries. The infographic demonstrates the status of road safety in the Asia-Pacific region. It includes detailed information on road crash fatality rates, proportion of population and road traffic fatality numbers in the region, and changes of the road safety status between 2016 and 2019</p
Pathways to adaptation and resilience in East and North East Asia : subregional report
No full textPathways to Adaptation and Resilience in East and North-East Asia takes forward the analysis of the Asia Pacific Disaster Report 2021 and demonstrates how the subregion is being affected by various risk parameters, and where new hotspots of exposure and vulnerability to climate-induced, cascading multi-hazard scenarios are being created. The report presents critical solutions and recommends that the subregion implements customized adaptation and resilience pathways with emphasis on risk-informed development policies and investments, resilient infrastructure, multi-hazard early warning systems, dry land agriculture, resilient water infrastructure and nature based solutions through technological innovations and subregional cooperation approaches. These measures can accelerate the progress of countries in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and the targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.</p
Asia-Pacific Riskscape @1.5C : subregional pathways for adaptation and resilience
Get PDFAsia-Pacific Disaster Report 2022 for ESCAP subregions: Summary for Policymakers builds on ESCAP’s Asia Pacific Disaster Report 2021, Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report 2022 and the latest reports (2021/2022) issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC reports show a startling increase in global warming impacts in that, as we move from 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, the risks to economies and people increase exponentially. It is worth noting that, while the overarching trends in climate change are global, they translate into different warming trends and impacts for each sub-region of Asia and the Pacific. Therefore, all sub-regions require their own risk profiles with sub-regional specificities in order to develop tailor-made resilience pathways to tackle multiple hazards.
ESCAP has downscaled the global models of warming to Asia and the Pacific and its sub-regions. The Asia Pacific Disaster Report 2022 for ESCAP Subregions shows that under all climate-change scenarios, and in comparison to global averages, Asia and the Pacific will be most impacted by heavy precipitation, followed by agricultural drought, hot temperatures/heatwaves, and warming winds with intensifying tropical cyclones. Further, the Report highlights how each ESCAP subregion will be impacted in the medium to long term climate scenarios, and where the new hotspots of exposure and vulnerability to climate-induced, cascading multi-hazard scenarios will be created. This analysis highlights the sub-regional specificities which could otherwise be masked by the regional analysis.
The Report recommends three key policy action tracks:
First—Customized adaptation & resilience pathways with emphasis on risk informed development policies and investments. The adaptation gaps are critical in vulnerable subregions which are likely to be impacted the most in the 1.5-to-2-degree warming scenarios.
Second—Frontier technologies and digital innovations not only reduce the cost of implementing the policy interventions, but also have game-changing impacts on scaling up transformative adaptation through enhanced risk analytics like impact forecasting and integrated multi-hazard risk assessment and early warning, surveillance, and strategic foresights, as well as for efficiently managing pandemics like COVID-19.
Third—Regional co-operation along with subregional co-operation hold immense potential for addressing the region’s shared vulnerabilities and risks that are set to be more critical at 1.5 to 2 degrees warming. Sub-regional co-operation approaches is key to supporting transboundary ecosystem adaptations and nature-based solutions for building the region’s resilience and moving towards a climate resilient society for all.
To facilitate the implementation of these recommendations, ESCAP has put in place the Asia-Pacific Risk and Resilience Portal as a delivery mechanism of the Asia-Pacific Disaster Resilience Network. It is aimed at supporting monitoring and implementation of climate and disaster-related Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. </p
Digital and sustainable trade facilitation in South and South-West Asia 2021
Get PDFThis report presents an analysis of the results of the United Nations Global Survey on Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation for 10 South and South-West Asian countries. The WTO TFA+ Survey was conducted during the first half of 2021 and covered 58 trade facilitation measures.
The report finds that achieving basic South and South-West Asia wide compliance with the WTO TFA may reduce trade costs in this subregion by only about 3-6% going forward. In contrast, a more ambitious strategy involving digital trade facilitation and cross-border paperless trade could reduce trade costs by close to 18%. In this regard, the Framework Agreement on the Facilitation of cross-border paperless trade in Asia and the Pacific (CPTA) could support countries in gradually moving to "less-paper" and then to paperless and cross-border paperless trade by providing a dedicated, inclusive and capacity-building focused intergovernmental platform
Digital connectivity : bolstering technical development and shaping the digital economy in South-East Asia
No full textDigital connectivity is an invaluable social asset, enabling people to seize new opportunities, shaping new economies and accelerating progress towards the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has worsened digital divides and developmental inequalities in the Asia-Pacific region.
Taken together, this working paper examines the intersection of connectivity and the digital economy in South-East Asia, particularly in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam.
The paper found that the availability of meaningful and affordable connectivity is a top policy priority to shape the digital economy and achieve the United Nations Secretary-General’s “Common Agenda”. The paper provides some recommendations to policymakers, authorities and intergovernmental organizations on bolstering information and communications technology development and paving the way to a sustainable, inclusive and resilient digital economy in South-East Asia.</p
Digital economies and evolving regulations : a parametric and nonparametric approach with bad output across countries
No full textWe use the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the parametric Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) to workout efficiency and productivity of the ICT sector across 50 countries for the time period 2016 and 2020. By considering OECD -DSTRI index as bad output, the study intends to estimate the influence of digital trade regulations (or digital services trade restrictiveness) on productivity and efficiency of the ICT sector across countries. The SFA scores are compared with the DEA efficiency scores and Malmquist Index based on four DEA problems are used to work out the total factor productivity of the ICT sector across countries and over two time periods. Cross country regression is run to understand the impact of ICT efficiency and productivity on average annual growth rate of GDP per-capita among other control factors. We use network readiness index of the World Economic Forum along with OECD-DSTRI index as our database.
Broadly, our results are three-fold. Firstly, we find that trade restrictiveness has very little to do with technical efficiency based on SFA frontier analysis. Secondly, we find no statistical difference in the technical efficiency scores of high and middle-income countries based on DEA analysis. We also found evidence of Asian countries faring better than the European Union countries in context of technical efficiencies. Thirdly, from our empirical results it seems that adoption of ICT and the so-called disruptive 4IR technologies have replaced labour and henceforth, we hypothesize that higher unemployment leads to higher growth rate along with a positive impact of network readiness on the growth rates. It seems that net neutrality and addressing pernicious regulations related to the ICT sector - barrier to competition, among others like foreign entry, mobility of people, regulatory transparency across countries can improve the productivity and efficiency of the ICT sector.</p
