"A number of empirical studies using cross-country data have found that poverty incidence responds very strongly to economic growth. This paper explores the impact of economic growth as well as changes in income inequality on poverty reduction using provincial data from Thailand over the period...

"Until recently, not much attention had been paid to the need to promote regional monetary and financial cooperation. This is surprising as cooperation in finance provides more opportunities for "win-win" situations. However, the pace of monetary and financial cooperation has picked up in the...

"Following the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, recovery in the export sector of crisis-affected countries has been slow, thereby raising important questions on the international competitiveness of firms in this region. In order for policymakers to restore the dynamism of Asian firms and...

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has long addressed ways to reduce poverty in its operations and has now established poverty reduction as its overarching objective. The intensified focus on poverty reduction needs to be addressed in conjunction with questions in development that remain on the...

"Access to new information and communication technologies (ICT) remains extremely unequally distributed across and within societies. While there have been a good deal of popular discussions about this "digital divide", not much is known about the quantitative significance of its various...

"While decentralization of education in DMCs has largely been driven by fiscal constraints, it has also been motivated by concerns about the effectiveness of a centralized system in delivering education services. The statistics are revealing: while virtually all DMCs have made impressive gains...

"Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a popular view among academic economists and policymakers is that developing countries with open capital accounts have only two options in their exchange rate regimes: either float the exchange rate freely or fix it hard. Within a fixed exchange rate...

"This paper surveys the growing literature on monetary cooperation in East Asia that goes beyond the Chiang Mai Initiative. It compares and contrasts the various proposals for cooperation such as the Williamson basket peg, the Asian monetary system, and the yen block as to their crisis...

"This paper evaluates the outreach and impact of two microfinance "village bank" programs that target the poor in Northeast Thailand. It controls for endogenous self-selection and program placement, using data from a unique survey conducted in 1995-1996. Results indicate that even prior to...

"Despite soft and fragmented regionalism, intraregional flows of trade, labor, and capital grew rapidly in Asia over the last few decades. However, in recent years, there has been retrogression in all the three areas basically associated with the slowdown in growth and departure from the East...