This report is produced under a renewed partnership between United Nations (ESCAP), ADB, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to support national and regional efforts to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It explores five megatrends that will determine whether everyone will be able to thrive and fulfill their expectations for a better life in the future: regional economic cooperation and integration; rural–urban transitions; demographic changes; ICT access and connectivity; and demand for natural resources. It ...

This study considers how education and globalization affect income inequality in Asia, with unbalanced panel data. The evidence supports the validity of Kuznets’ inverted-U hypothesis for the connection between income level and income inequality. However, when more variables are integrated into the model, the consistency of the inverse U-shaped curve becomes weaker. The empirical results suggest that educational variables are highly influential in affecting income distribution. Our analysis indicates that a higher level of education achieved by ...

Background: Inequalities in health represent a major problem in many countries, including Indonesia. Addressing health inequality is a central component of the Sustainable Development Goals and a priority of the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO provides technical support for health inequality monitoring among its member states. Following a capacity-building workshop in the WHO South-East Asia Region in 2014, Indonesia expressed interest in incorporating healthinequality monitoring into its national health information system. Objectives: This ...

Leaving no one behind” is at the heart of the agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals, requiring that health systems be vigilant to how interventions can be accessed equitably by all, including population subgroups that face exclusion. In the World Health Organization (WHO) South-East Asia Region, inequalities can be found across and within countries but there has been a growing commitment to examining and starting to tackle them. Over the past decade in particular, WHO has been developing an armamentarium of tools to enable analysis of health ...

This volume is a compilation of the papers presented at the High-Level Workshop on the Evolving Nature of ASEAN’s Economic Cooperation: Original Vision and Current Practice, containing the authors’ personal reflections on ASEAN’s journey toward economic integration. The papers review the historical evolution of ASEAN’s economic agenda, capture its achievements, examine the challenges that have surfaced in the last decade, and recommend a way forward. The papers in this volume emphasize that, while there have been notable successes, the remaining ...