Over the last thirty years, economic growth, job creation and poverty reduction rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have been much lower than in East Asia. However, thanks to democratization, the end of structural adjustment policies and renewed economic growth since 2002, LAC has...

Social protection has become part and parcel of the development response in Southeast Asia and across the globe and is likely to gain even greater prominence in light of the post-2015 development agenda. Its set of objectives has steadily widened with social protection now expected to fulfil a...

The paper examines social protection programmes for the poor, aged and sick in Indonesia and the Philippines with the purpose of assessing their performance in effectively protecting the population. This comparative review indicates that both countries have made major advances in improving...

Social protection policies involve distributional politics and practices that pose significant challenges. Focusing on Indonesia, where such policies are rapidly expanding, this paper discusses two programmes most relevant to the poor - the rice for welfare (Rastra) scheme and the conditional...

This paper provides an overview of Singapore’s inequality since 2000. Upon examining empirical indicators reflecting different aspects of inequality, there seems to be a divergence between largely stable macro-level trends and “felt” inequality experienced by citizens. While the empirical...

This paper assesses the role of global value chains (GVCs) in services and identifies the sector’s contributions towards the expansion of the Japanese economy. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the tourism sector in Japan, which has been witnessing rapid growth in recent years. Tourism is...

This paper examines the development of the services sector in India in terms of the global value chain (GVC) framework. In particular, it looks at the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) services and finds that firm characteristics such as size, age and foreign...

This paper examines the services sector in Thailand with a focus on regional and global value chains, highlighting the case of the logistics sector. Overall, the results indicate that in Thailand, services exhibit relatively low labour productivity as compared to other sectors. The logistics...