رشد اقتصادی در آسیا: عوامل و چشم اندازها

Using a growth accounting framework, we find that developing Asia grew rapidly over the past three decades mainly due to robust growth in capital accumulation. The contributions of education and total factor productivity in the region's past economic growth remain relatively limited. We also make long-run growth projections for developing Asia by combining the growth accounting framework with growth regression approach. Our baseline projections based on the model of conditional convergence show that the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of the 12 developing Asian economies covered by this paper will be consistently lower for the next two decades than their historical performance. However, policy reforms in education, property rights, and research and development can substantially raise GDP growth in the region and partly offset the slowdown in growth caused by the convergence phenomenon. Even under the baseline scenario, the region's share in the world economy will increase from the current 34 percent in 2009 to close to a half in 2030.

Developing Asia weathered the global economic crisis of 2008/09 well. It was the first region to emerge from the turmoil, helped by decisive and large-scale fiscal and monetary policy measures. Domestic demand has been resilient, especially in the region's larger economies, and the economic cycle clearly suggests that economies have bottomed and begun to recover. A number of Asian economies even posted double-digit gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the first half of 2010. Now, as the recovery takes firm hold, the region faces a more crucial challenge for its sustained growth in the long run. The question is whether the economies in the region can return to the rapid growth of the past few decades.

The developing Asian region has grown strongly over the past three decades, but the pace clipped twice: in the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis and the 2008/09 global financial crisis. Nevertheless, the region managed to rebound quickly from both. Using a growth accounting framework, we examine the factors that contributed to developing Asia's rapid economic performance from 1981 to 2007. We find that the region's economic expansion has generally been marked by robust growth in capital accumulation. While labor input, education, and total factor productivity have on the whole been positive as well, their contributions to GDP growth have been much more moderate. We then generated baseline projections of GDP growth for our sample economies for 2011–2020 and 2021–2030, by combining the growth accounting framework with regression results for key components of GDP growth. We find that GDP growth projections for the next two decades tend to be lower than the historical performance of the 12 developing Asian economies. Only in Pakistan and the Philippines did GDP growth projections turn out to be higher than past figures. Forecasts for 2011–2020 also tend to be higher than those for 2021–2030, driven largely by the “convergence” phenomenon.