Villagers returning home as the sun sets in the Philippines. Credit: UN Photo
Any contemporary story on development in Asia-Pacific begins with reflection on massive gains achieved in the fight against poverty. The incidence of people living at less than 1.25 dollars a day fell from 54.5 percent in 1990 to 20.7 percent in 2010, with the number of extreme poor declining from 1.48 billion to 733 million. This precipitous decline in poverty has been accompanied by tremendous gains in access to health and education.
Without diminishing the progress made over the last 25 years, the region remains somewhat of a paradox: enviable growth and wealth on one hand and dire poverty and inequality on the other. Asia-Pacific remains home to more than 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor and two-thirds of the world’s hungry. While we’ve seen progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is uneven across and within countries. Despite eye-popping gross domestic product growth, increasing income inequality and vulnerability, infrastructure constraints, climate change and disaster risks threaten to undermine achievements.
As these threats increase, the region’s sources of finance and aid architecture are also rapidly changing. High rates of growth and challenging budget environments in many member-countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have resulted in a decline of concessional development finance across Asia. This is against a backdrop of non-aid resources – such as remittances and foreign direct investment – increasing in importance and a growth in funding from “non-traditional” donors, including emerging economies and philanthropic organisations. On top of this, more countries have greater access to international capital markets to fund their development needs.
International efforts to make aid more effective — with conferences held from Rome (2003) to Paris (2005) and Accra (2008) — focused on good principles for aid providers and recipients, largely in the context of attaining the MDGs at the country level. It was less clear how these narrow principles would remain relevant in a rapidly changing global environment, particularly here in Asia-Pacific.
The Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation, launched at the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, recognised this and highlighted partnerships based on shared principles for better development results, nudging forward the agenda on MDG 8 (Develop a Global Partnership for Development). This was advanced further by the United Nations High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda which called for a new global partnership framework – a transformative shift for co-operation and mutual accountability. In Bali, March 2013, the Panel agreed on the central importance of a global partnership for a “people-centred and planet-sensitive agenda”, based on “common humanity”.
These developments demonstrate an emerging view that any post-2015 framework needs to be supported by dynamic partnerships. If stakeholders ultimately agree, then the successor to Goal 8 will be central to all other post-2015 goals and applicable to all countries – unlike the MDG framework where goals 1-7 applied to developing countries and goal 8 primarily targeted developed countries.
Asia-Pacific has undertaken serious effort to examine emerging development challenges and goals from a regional perspective, even as the globally agreed post-2015 agenda is being finalised. The eighth Asia-Pacific Regional MDG Report 2012/2013 calls for integrating the three pillars of sustainable development – economic prosperity, social equity, and environmental responsibility into a post-2015 development framework.
By 2015, the ninth report will consolidate ideas from the region on development partnerships and offer insights to strengthen the successor to Goal 8. Three strategic areas for regional and global partnerships have been identified, which help articulate the region’s priorities for a successor to MDG 8. These include:
- regional public goods - e.g. promoting technology and knowledge transfer in the areas of food security, environment and health, which will not only help address development deficits in individual countries, but also have cross-border implications;
- data - strengthening the evidence base for planning and monitoring, including more disaggregation to measure and address inequalities and tracking energy-intensity of GDP rather than just (already low) per capita emissions; and
- finance ̶ expanding financing options for the Post-2015 agenda from both public and private sources.
Countries must each find ways to link the post-2015 and Global Partnership agendas – bringing together distinct goals to reflect nations’ different but complementary responsibilities for a shared global agenda. Collectively, we need to co-ordinate these interlinked agendas – including MDG 8 discussions and the Global Partnership – as well as identify ways to measure results from these partnerships and indicators attached to the successor to MDG 8.
Responding to the region’s aspirations, the Asian Development Bank stands ready to support this process any way we can.
Stephen P. Groff is the Asian Development Bank’s Vice-President for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
]]>It’s not easy for a European observer of US politics to understand why the US Congress seems so much more concerned by Iran’s nuclear activities than by those of North Korea (the DPRK). Congressional pressure on the White House to put a stop to Iranian activities seems never-ending and Congressional majorities [...]]]>
It’s not easy for a European observer of US politics to understand why the US Congress seems so much more concerned by Iran’s nuclear activities than by those of North Korea (the DPRK). Congressional pressure on the White House to put a stop to Iranian activities seems never-ending and Congressional majorities for anti-Iranian resolutions are staggering. In comparison, when did Congress last pass a resolution requiring the administration to take action against the DPRK?
On the face of it, this makes little sense. To a European, North Korea looks to be a greater and more actual threat to US interests than Iran.
North Korea is sitting atop enough plutonium for perhaps a dozen nuclear weapons. Two underground nuclear tests have shown that the North Koreans are able to put together nuclear devices, though experts surmise that these are still somewhat rudimentary.
North Korea has also acquired the capacity to enrich uranium. Western experts have seen a relatively small enrichment plant at the main DPRK nuclear research centre. There has been speculation that there exists a larger plant deep within the mountains in the North of the country.
Iran has no plutonium. Iran possesses enough low-enriched uranium for half a dozen nuclear weapons but has so far shown no sign of wanting to enrich this material to the 90% level required for weapons. The Iranians are not suspected of having conducted nuclear tests; they may not be capable of assembling a workable nuclear explosive device.
North Korea expelled the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the end of 2002, and has only allowed them back in for a brief period since. Over the last ten years no state has received as many IAEA inspections as Iran, whose two enrichment plants were declared to the IAEA before they started to operate.
North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in early 2003, having failed to correct the nuclear safeguards non-compliance declared by the IAEA in 1993. Iran corrected its pre-2004 safeguards failures within two years of their discovery; it expressed regret over these transgressions; and ever since it has affirmed the fullest of commitments to the NPT, to which it became a party fifteen years before the DPRK.
North Korea’s nuclear weapons are viewed as a threat by two of the US’s most valuable allies: Japan and South Korea (the ROK). These two allies are crucial to the US’s defence of its strategic interests in the Western Pacific. In the event of hostilities between the US and China (heaven forefend!) Japan would offer the US vital staging facilities, akin to those the US would have enjoyed in the UK if the US needed to go to war on the European mainland.
US strategic interests in South West Asia are on the wane. The US is now self-sufficient in natural gas and imports less than 12% of the crude oil it consumes from the Gulf; it could quite easily switch to African and American suppliers if Saudi and Iraqi supplies were threatened. Over the last decade the risk of Iraqi transfers of WMDs to Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda acquisition of safe havens in the Middle East has been eliminated (albeit at a price!).
Since the end of the Cold War, over twenty years ago, no single power has been capable of challenging US influence in South West Asia, whereas China is increasingly seen in the US as an emerging challenger to the US in East Asia.
When it comes to making belligerent noises, Iran’s leaders can’t hold a candle to those of North Korea. And the average alienist would surely find it easier to treat the former than the latter.
In 2011 US merchandise exports to the Far East were worth $286 billion and imports $718 billion. Comparable figures for South West Asia, including Turkey and Israel, were $71 billion and $108 billion. Far Eastern investors supply the US with a far larger percentage of external credit than do Middle Eastern investors. Far Eastern corporations are major employers and tax-payers in the United States.
All of these very basic facts must be familiar to Congressional staffers, if not to members of Congress. So how can one explain the disproportionate attention that Congress pays to Iran’s nuclear activities?
I have a theory. But I think it would be more appropriate for me to leave readers to come up with their own answers. I suspect that most will be honest enough to admit to themselves that they have a pretty shrewd idea as well.
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