This paper documents inequality in health and education outcomes by constructing an index of human capital disaggregated by quintiles of socioeconomic status (SES) for a sample 51 mostly low- and middle-income countries. The index measures the expected future human capital of children born today, following the methodology of the World Bank Human Capital Index that was launched in October 2018. Within-country disparities in human capital outcomes across SES quintiles are large, accounting for roughly one-third of the total variation. On average, ...

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 ...

ASEAN has gradually built, on the basis of both shared interests and common principles and norms, various practices and mechanisms that helped prevent conflict among its members and allowed it to play an autonomous role in shaping the regional security architecture. Overcoming the member states' preoccupation with their own national concerns to give way to advocacy of collective interests has remained difficult, but progress is being made. Part A of this volume looks at the processes and dynamics, challenges, and opportunities of ASEAN ...

Since 2000, Southeast Asia has had some of the fastest growing economies in the world. Indonesia’s economy has enjoyed 6 percent annual growth—but will its lack of infrastructure and its commodity dependence soon reveal some cracks in its economy? The remarkable growth in the Philippines will not last unless domestic investment is elevated. Thailand’s growth has stalled amid political turmoil, and it is currently in a classic credit bubble. Vietnam still generates impressive growth, but it has a banking problem, high inflation, and ubiquitous ...

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 ...

City Deals’ are new governance instruments for urban development. Vast evidence exists on the relationship between urban factors and health equity, but little research applies a health equity lens to urban policy-making. This paper does precisely that for the Western Sydney City Deal (WSCD) in Australia. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of publicly available documents and interviews with the WSCD’s main architects, applying insights from relevant theories. We find ‘pro-growth’ discourse to encourage economic investment dominates any ...

Income inequality is one of the most profound social, economic, and political challenges of our time. The gap between the rich and the poor has been regarded as a major concern for policy makers. This gap is at its highest level in decades for developed economies, while the inequality trend has been rising in many developing countries. In Asia, despite recent economic growth, income distribution has been worsening as well. This book contributes to the existing literature on inequality in Asia by overviewing the new trend of inequality in Asia and ...