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...

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 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...

The paper examines the global production value chain in Singapore’s services sector. Specifically, it explores some of the key activities related to the retail value chain in the country. Based on the experience of other major economies, the productivity and competitiveness of the retail...

This paper examines the services global value chain activities in Korea using the TiVA (Trade in Value-Added) database and firm-level data. The results indicate that Korea’s services sector has been expanding gradually, with its value-added share increasing from nearly 50 per cent during the...