Optimism Remains High on Asia's Future, ADB Report Says

Asia has scored the highest growth rates in the world over the past decade and the optimism remains high that Asia will have a bright and shining future despite the current global slowdown and new challenges facing the region.

These are the major messages contained in the book "Growth and Change in Asia and the Pacific -- Key indicators 2001", an Asian Development Bank publication that was launched here Thursday.

"Despite the current slowdown, Asia shows positive trends that argue well for the future -- strong underlying economic growth, declining population growth rates, an emerging middle class and continued high savings rates," the reports underscored.

"Asia is well equipped to ride the storm and resume the path of growth and welfare improvement," the report concluded.

The report underlined that "the remarkable growth performance of the region was largely influenced by the continued dynamism of the People's Republic of China, the Newly Industrialized Economies (NIEs) and the Southeast Asian 'tigers' and better performance in South Asia after decades of slow growth," the report says.

The report pointed out that Asia and the Pacific led all other developing regions of the world over the past decade with a six- percent GDP growth rate in every year except for 1998 and the high sustained growth has been aided by lowered population pressures and leading to improved living standards, better social conditions and reduced poverty in most countries.

The population growth rates in developing Asia slowed down markedly to 1.45 percent in the 1990s with the population of China and the NIEs expanding at the below-average rates, the reports said, adding the slowdown in the population growth has helped per capita income grow at a faster rate and spurred higher standards of living.

The poverty numbers fell in most countries with China alone having lifted more than 100 million people out of poverty, the report said, noting living conditions in developing Asia have improved featuring increase in primary school enrollment rates, a fall in infant mortality, a general rise in female life expectancy, an access to electricity, portable water supply, TV, Radio, Newspaper and better housing.

The report attributes these achievements to the macroeconomic policies and market friendly measures such as trade-oriented development strategy, openness to external sector to attract foreign direct investments, high domestic saving rates, growing ability to absorb technology and emergence of growing middle class.

"Overall, Asia is poised to achieve the targets of the International Development Goals (IDG) by 2015," ADB Vice-President Myoung-Ho Shin said at the press conference, referring to the targets of halving the proportion of very poor people, promoting universal primary education and reducing infant and maternal mortality rates.

However, he pointed out that the major risk in achieving the IDGs is that if the U.S., Japan, and Europe do not start to turn round by the first quarter of 2002 and global slowdown continues for longer than expected time, there will be inevitably delay in reducing the number of poor and in improving social conditions across Asia.

The reports also said that capacity to attract and manage private capital flow, increasing trend of poverty and growing urbanization will pose challenges to the Asian-Pacific region.

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