Gender Differences in Access to Health Care among the Elderly: Evidence from Southeast Asia

Populations become increasingly feminized with age. Since older women are more vulnerable to poverty, they may find it more difficult than men to access health care. This study examines factors that may constrain older persons in Southeast Asia from meeting their health-care needs when sick. Our analysis of household survey data from Cambodia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam shows that women are more likely to have reported sickness or injury than men, a difference that is meaningful and statistically significant. While women in Cambodia and the Philippines are more likely to seek treatment than men, the gender difference is reversed in Viet Nam where the stigma and discrimination associated with some diseases may more strongly deter women. The probability of seeking treatment rises with age more sharply for women than men in all countries. However, for the subsample of elders, the gender difference is not significant.

Investigating ASEAN’s Participation in Global Value Chains: Production Fragmentation and Regional Integration

This paper focuses on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—a major final assembler in production—where studies and evidence on the role of the region in global value chains are limited. We seek to provide new evidence regarding the extent and patterns of international fragmentation in ASEAN. To do so, we derive the foreign value-added shares of final products for all global value chains of ASEAN. Using the Asian Development Bank’s multiregional input–output tables for 2000–2017, we document a series of stylized facts. The results show declining foreign value-added shares in ASEAN. Regional economic integration within ASEAN has increased, while value-added contributions vary widely across its members. We find evidence of increasing value-added contributions from emerging economies to ASEAN, whereas the contributions from advanced economies have declined.

Enabling an Innovation Ecosystem and Participation at the Higher End of Global Value Chains

Moving up the global value chain requires an enabling innovation ecosystem alongside economy-specific endowments, a mix of supportive policies in broad areas of infrastructure and institutions, and other enabling factors. Examining sample economies globally and in developing Asia, the empirical results suggest that during the transition from a low level of upgrading in a global value chain to a medium-level one, efforts should focus on increasing the scale of innovation inputs, allowing firms to improve in many areas of their capacity to innovate. To move higher up a global value chain, the design of innovation policies should gradually emphasize the production of technological, knowledge, and creative outputs.

Discouraged Worker Effect and Labor Market Behavior of Urban Married Women

The study investigates the importance of poor local labor market conditions in explaining the labor market behavior of married women in urban India. Using nationally representative employment data, we empirically test for the existence of a discouraged worker effect arising from either of two mechanisms: (i) unexplained gender wage gap, or (ii) degree of underemployment. A three-stage, district-level analysis of female labor market behavior was undertaken, and selectivity bias was controlled for by using censored probit in the second stage and trivariate probit with Geweke–Hajivassiliou–Keane smooth recursive simulator technique in the third stage of this multilevel framework. We find evidence that the wage gap discourages women from participating in the labor market and the prevalence of underemployment, in terms of overqualification by occupation, discourages them from exploring better job opportunities by making on-job search efforts.

Policy-Driven Boom and Bust in the Housing Market: Evidence from Mongolia

This paper examines the effects of a mortgage interest rate subsidy on booms and busts in the housing market by analyzing the Housing Mortgage program in Mongolia. We find that the most recent housing boom in Mongolia occurred from the second quarter (Q2) of 2012 to first quarter (Q1) of 2014, and that the subsequent housing bust lasted 4 years. Both house-specific factors and macroeconomic variables had a significant influence on housing price dynamics. Mortgage interest rate semielasticity and real household income elasticity were estimated as −3 and 1.4, respectively. Dynamic analysis of the estimated vector error correction models suggests that the country’s policy intervention in the mortgage market—introducing an interest rate subsidy on mortgage loans for residential properties of up to 80 square meters—drove the recent housing boom in Mongolia.

Long-Term Dynamics of Poverty Transitions in India

I use a stochastic model to explore the dynamics of poverty in India from 1952 to 2006 and find that temporal transitions into and out of poverty are common. Model outcomes suggest that transitions out of poverty outnumber transitions into poverty in recent times, but that there is still a nontrivial proportion of individuals transitioning annually into poverty, highlighting the economic fragility of those near the poverty line. There is also a marked persistence of poverty over time, and although this has been slowly declining, past poverty remains a good predictor of current poverty. Particularly concerning in this context are the income trajectories of those in the bottom decile of the income distribution for whom escape from poverty appears infeasible given extant income dynamics. Finally, the dynamics suggest that transitional and persistent poverty are distinct phenomena that require distinct policy responses involving both missing markets and state action.

The ADB COVID-19 Policy Database: A Guide to Understanding Changes in Sectoral Balances and Private Sector Financial Positions in 2020

The Asian Development Bank COVID-19 Policy Database recently added an entry on sector financial balances (SFBs). This addition to the policy database provides information for 35 economies on the financial positions of the private sector, government sector, and the rest of the world, which by construction add up to 0. Data used to calculate SFBs are obtained directly from flow-of-funds accounts. When this source is not available, we obtain data from the national accounts. We use SFBs to understand why the private sector balance moved into a large surplus in 2020. We argue that this surplus is a mirror image of the fiscal deficit.

The Relationship between Product Complexity and Exchange Rate Elasticities: Evidence from the People’s Republic of China’s Manufacturing Industries

More complex products are less substitutable in international trade and may therefore have lower price elasticities. We investigate this issue using 960 types of manufactured exports from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to 190 partner economies disaggregated at the Harmonized System 4-digit level. We measure complexity using Hidalgo and Hausmann’s (2009) product complexity index. We find that price elasticities are lower for more complex goods. These results imply that the PRC can reduce its exporters’ exposure to tariffs, trade wars, and exchange rate volatility by upgrading its export basket.

Constructing a Coincident Economic Indicator for India: How Well Does It Track Gross Domestic Product?

In India, the first official estimate of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) is released approximately 7–8 weeks after the end of the reference quarter. To provide an early estimate of current quarter GDP growth, we construct Coincident Economic Indicators for India (CEIIs) using a sequentially expanding list of 6, 9, and 12 high-frequency indicators. These indicators represent various sectors, display high contemporaneous correlation with GDP, and track GDP turning points well. CEII-6 includes domestic economic activity indicators, while CEII-9 incorporates indicators of trade and services and CEII-12 adds financial indicators in the model. We include a financial block in CEII-12 to reflect the growing influence of the financial sector on economic activity. CEIIs are estimated using a dynamic factor model which extracts a common trend underlying the high-frequency indicators. The extracted trend provides a real-time assessment of the state of the economy and helps identify sectors contributing to economic fluctuations. Furthermore, GDP nowcasts using CEIIs show considerable gains in both in-sample and out-of-sample accuracy. In particular, we observe that our GDP growth nowcast closely tracks the recent slowdown in the Indian economy.

On the Two Catching-Up Mechanisms in Asian Development

Existing studies identify two major underlying mechanisms behind East and Southeast Asia’s miraculous economic performance in the past 5 decades: accumulation and technological catching-up. This study investigates empirically the relative importance of these two mechanisms in Asian development based on a unified framework. Using canonical cross-economy panel data, the study arrives at three important findings. First, while the process of catching-up through capital accumulation played an important role worldwide, this mechanism was more salient in Asia than in other economies around the globe, especially during the region’s early phase of growth and development. Second, human capital formation had a significant positive effect on the technological catching-up process worldwide. In particular, human capital formation promoted technology adoption more strongly in Asia than in the rest of the world. Third, innovation has also been critical in facilitating recent growth in Asian economies. These results suggest that Asia’s capital-accumulation-driven growth in the early phase induced human capital formation and international technological transfers at later phases, with strong complementarities between these two types of capital. Asian economies likely went through three phases of catching-up, that is, capital accumulation, technological imitation, and then innovation. The experiences of these Asian economies in the last several decades provide critical lessons for latecomer growth and development.