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Resource materials on data privacy laws in the Asia and the pacific : webinar on data privacy laws in ASEAN
No full textThis resource document on "Data Privacy Laws in Asia and the Pacific" was prepared by Emmanuel C. Lallana, under the overall direction of Kiyoung Ko, Director of the Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for Development (APCICT/ESCAP), and used as training material for the Webinar on Data Privacy Laws in ASEAN, jointly organized by the National Privacy Commission (NPC) of the Republic of the Philippines and APCICT/ESCAP, from 30 November to 3 December 2020.</p
Learning materials on railway transport
No full textThe learning materials were developed for capacity building activities to strengthen subregional connectivity in East and North-East Asia through effective economic corridor management. ESCAP East and North-East Asia Office worked with Mr. Goran Andreev under the supervision of Mr. Sandeep Raj Jain, Economic Affairs Officer, Transport Connectivity and Logistics Section (TCLS), ESCAP Transport Division in developing the learning materials.</p
Empowering women to join global value chains through e-commerce : experiences in South Asia in COVID-19 context : report of virtual high level forum held on 20 October 2020
No full textA virtual High-Level Forum on 'Empowering Women to join Global Value Chains through E commerce: Experiences in South Asia in COVID-19 Context' was convened by South and South-West Asia Office (SSWA) of UNESCAP in collaboration with Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF), Geneva on 20 October 2020. The objective of this dialogue was to bring together the eminent leaders and women entrepreneurs from South Asia to hear their perspectives in addressing the challenges relating to empowering women and creating awareness to leverage the opportunities for promoting business through ecommerce
An assessment of fiscal space for COVID-19 response and recovery in Asia-Pacific developing countries
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic which started in China has resulted in the worst setback in global development in recent decades, with 1.1 million confirmed deaths as of mid-October and some 150 million people expected to fall back into extreme poverty. In the face of such unprecedented crisis, governments around the world have deployed trillions of dollars in emergency health response and relief measures for households and firms. Fiscal policy is also expected to play a central role in the recovery phase, in stimulating the economy and 'building forward better.' However, it is unclear whether developing countries have the fiscal policy space to sustain necessary countercyclical measures and invest in priority areas such as health, social protection, digital infrastructure, and climate action.
This policy brief provides a preliminary assessment of fiscal space in Asia-Pacific developing countries in the wake of COVID-19. It starts by assessing the size and composition of fiscal packages announced in response to the crisis. There are three main findings.
First, countries which entered the crisis with limited fiscal space relied on smaller fiscal support packages, at the risk of delaying the recovery.
Second, COVID-19 will considerably increase government debt burden over the medium-term, potentially limiting resources for development purposes.
Third, for the poorest and most vulnerable countries, international support measures to date are helpful but inadequate; more is needed.
In response, three policy suggestions are highlighted.
First, countries should avoid premature fiscal consolidation and safeguard development expenditures to build forward better.
Second, countries need to expand their fiscal space through revenue reforms, capital market development, and effective public debt management.
Third, international support for the poorest and most vulnerable countries should include targeted debt relief.
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COVID-19 and South Asia : national strategies and subregional cooperation for accelerating inclusive, sustainable and resilient recovery
No full textStarting as a health emergency, COVID-19-the global pandemic has evolved into an economic and a ‘human crisis,’ of mammoth proportions. As governments locked down the populations in an effort to contain the pandemic to save lives, economic activities have been disrupted, leaving millions of people jobless, pushing them into poverty and hunger, and plunging the world economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. South Asia, a subregion with nearly a quarter of world’s population but over a third of world’s people living in extreme poverty and hunger, has been impacted severely given the vast proportion of population living at the margins, fragmented coverage of social protection, pervasive informality in economic activities and employment, and wide gaps in public health infrastructure. Millions of workers have been rendered jobless, inequalities have been accentuated and the crisis is likely to reverse years, if not decades, of gains in poverty reduction, undermining the progress made by the subregion towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Prepared as a part of the UNESCAP Framework on Socio-Economic Response to COVID-19, this paper argues that effort of governments should not be to go back to the status quo ante but to build back better by turning the crisis into an opportunity to create more equal, sustainable and resilient societies in South Asia, helping the subregion to also close the SDG gaps expeditiously.
South Asia entered the COVID-19 crisis with a low level of preparedness: The COVID-19 outbreak hit South Asia at a time when the SDGs were gaining traction and countries had begun to make some progress. Gaps in public health infrastructure, basic sanitation facilities and access to broadband connectivity have been exposed in addressing the pandemic. With already elevated levels of fiscal deficits and public debt, governments of the South Asian countries found themselves having limited fiscal space to mount major relief and stimulus packages needed to mitigate socioeconomic impacts
Vertical integration of climate change policies and actions in Asia-Pacific cities
Get PDFIn late-2019, few would have imagined that it would be a global pandemic, not climate change, that would dominate the global agenda. While the pandemic continues to demand government attention throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, focus will begin to shift from managing infections towards a sustainable economic recovery. As this happens, an opportunity for a green, low carbon and resilient recovery could present itself. Once the pandemic subsides, climate change mitigation and adaptation actions will return to the forefront, especially as we move towards the 26th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the UNFCCC, due to take place in November 2021 in Glasgow. As we progress towards this milestone, can cities emerge as the leaders in promoting a low-carbon, climate resilient economic recovery in Asia-Pacific? To achieve increasingly ambitious emissions reduction targets, while meeting adaptation needs that will arise from the ever more frequent and extreme impacts of climate change, countries in Asia and the Pacific as well as throughout the world will need to adopt increasingly innovative and responsive approaches. An essential part of these approaches is vertical integration of climate change actions among and between different levels of government, under a multi-level governance framework that involves different combinations of public, private and non-state actors and, importantly, citizens themselves. This discussion paper explores the linkages between climate change ambitions, policies, multi-level governance frameworks and vertical integration in cities in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, it focuses on what the paper calls: (a) specific instruments: decentralization, finance, and measuring, reporting and verification systems (MRV); and (b) cross-cutting instruments: country and city-level capacity, citizen engagement and participation and digitization. The paper draws examples from countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, with the scope and audience of the paper being climate and urban development policymakers, technical-level officials and practitioners from across the Asia-Pacific region
COVID-19 and person with disabilities
No full textIn the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, governments have the responsibility to mainstream disability inclusion into pandemic responses to ensure that the rights and wellbeing of persons with disabilities are safeguarded
The impact of COVID-19 induced non-tariff measures on SPECA countries’ trade patterns : evidence from UNECE’s survey of freight forwarders. Fifteenth session of the SPECA Working Group on Trade
No full textSustainable urban transport index (SUTI) mobility assessment report - Yangon
No full textFor additional reports or materials on Sustainable urban transport index, please click here
New global estimates of import demand elasticities : a technical note
Get PDFThis study provides new estimates of import demand elasticities for over 180 countries and all traded products at the 2012 harmonized system (HS) six-digit level using state-of-the art estimation techniques and computing hardware based on trade data up to 2019. Limited Information Maximum Likelihood (LIML), together with nonlinear LIML constrained to fix infeasible estimates, proposed by Soderbery (2015), is used in constructing an initial dataset based on the 2002 HS six-digit classification. A concordance and filling exercise then enables transformation of elasticities to the 2012 HS version for all traded products. Raw data (before the concordance and filling exercise) contains almost 300,000 elasticities of import demand, covering more than 5,000 product lines in 185 economies. The unique computation method employed in this study has only previously been employed for estimations of limited geographical scope due to the large computing power requirements. This study employed advanced processing hardware and efficiency increasing techniques to make it possible to apply this method to estimate a global dataset of elasticities.
Full matrix of elasticities, including extrapolated values in H4 (2012) HS version can be accessed here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CxdkTd8LQ3X98n03Ih2GdrCHkgjZfIBr/view?usp=sharing
Raw elasticities calculated in H2 (2002) HS version, together with R code and concordance matrix for converting the dataset to H4 (2012) version as well as extrapolating missing values can be found here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KjKvrb8GSa2c4xn82SGyUiTPTfdsPBAw/view?usp=sharing
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