The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has been issuing its Sustainability Report since 2007. The Sustainability Report allows stakeholders to assess ADB's operational and organizational sustainability performance, providing them with a single point of reference to understand ADB's commitment to sustainable development. For 2018, this biennial Sustainability Report highlights the integration of sustainability into ADB's operations and organizational activities during 2016–2017. A separate detailed Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Content Index sets out ADB's management approaches to material topics and responses to general and specific disclosures in the GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards. The Sustainability Report and detailed GRI Content Index are prepared in accordance with the core option of the GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards and are available online at www.adb.org/documents/asian-development-bank-sustainability-report-2018.

The Asian Development Bank Sustainability Report has been produced biennially since 2007. It enables stakeholders to understand and assess ADB’s sustainability performance in its project investments, technical assistance, knowledge services, and corporate footprint. The publication consists of two parts. Part I: Highlights presents the major economic, social, and environmental impacts of ADB’s operations and headquarters for 2018 and 2019. Part II: The Global Reporting Initiative Content Index provides detailed information and data on the integration of sustainability in ADB’s operations, facilities, and organizational activities against the reporting standards of the Global Reporting Initiative.

Growth in developing Asia is holding up against external headwinds. Robust domestic demand supported the region's large economies, and oil prices above expectations boosted prospects for many oil and gas exporters. Consumer prices are picking up with rising global fuel and food prices, but moderate inflation in several Asian economies has kept the regional average in check. Downside risks to the outlook are intensifying. If tightened more than investors expect, US monetary policy could accelerate capital outflow from Asian economies and put further depreciation pressure on regional currencies. Any escalation of the trade conflict could disrupt cross-border production links. Most economies remain robust, but policy makers must be ready to respond. In the years since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, sound domestic macroeconomic fundamentals and buoyant external conditions have supported developing Asia's rise to become an engine of the global economy. However, the changing global landscape poses new challenges to the maintenance of macroeconomic stability. This Update explores the key pockets of vulnerability and the policy options available to manage them. To fortify the region against heightened uncertainty, policy makers may need to deploy the full range of policy tools, while forging and safeguarding the sound fundamentals that support economic, social, and political stability.

The implicit topology of international institutional complexes varies greatly across policy areas. In some areas, the lion's share of everyday policy cooperation is shaped by a single institution with alternative and more regional institutions operating in its shadow. In other policy fields, institutional structures appear to be different, seeing a range of non-hierarchical, decentralized, alternative institutions. The Institutional Topology of International Regime Complexes: Mapping Inter-Institutional Structures in Global Governance provides a systematic conceptualization and explanation of the evolution of these varying institutional topologies underlying regime complexes across five issue areas of Global Governance: Intellectual Property Protection, Tax Avoidance, Financial Stability, Development Aid, and Energy Governance. By providing an empirically grounded, network-based conceptualization and mapping of institutional topologies, as well as a theoretical explanation for their variation across policy space and time, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of both the empirical manifestation of inter-institutional structures across various policy fields of Global Governance and the issue specific factors that shape the varying institutional trajectories spurring (de-) centralization. Daßler combines quantitative network analyses with qualitative case studies to trace institutional decentralization processes across five highly relevant issue areas of Global Governance. This volume shows how the nature of issue-specific cooperation problems translates into disparate structures among multilateral institutions occupying the same regime complex. In light of growing concerns about the future trajectories of Global Governance in times of heightened geopolitical tensions, Daßler offers a fresh perspective to comparatively capture the profoundly varying institutional landscapes across different issue areas and their associated challenges and benefits of multilateral cooperation. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

The annual Asian Development Outlook, now in its 30th year, analyzes economic performance in the past year and forecasts performance in the next 2 years for the 45 economies in Asia and the Pacific that make up developing Asia. Growth prospects in developing Asia remain strong despite persistent external headwinds responsible for moderating expansion since 2017. Global trade and economic activity weakened toward the end of 2018, slowing growth in many economies in the region. The outlook is cloudy with risks that tilt to the downside. A drawn-out trade conflict could undermine trade and investment in the region, and US fiscal policy and the consequences of a disorderly Brexit could weigh on growth in the advanced economies and the People's Republic of China. Though the risk of sharp increases in US interest rates has subsided, policy makers must stay vigilant. Disasters are shaped by natural hazards and the dynamics of the economy, society, and environment in which they occur. They pose a growing threat to development and prosperity in the region, their consequences disproportionately severe in developing countries, especially for the poor and marginalized. As developing Asia is home to more than four-fifths of the people affected by disasters globally in the past 2 decades, the region must strengthen its disaster resilience. This means integrating disaster risk reduction into national development and investment plans, spending more on prevention for a better balance with spending on rescue and recovery, and pooling risk through insurance and reinsurance.

Investors are increasingly integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues into their investment decisions. Currently, more than half of managed assets in Europe are linked to ESG factors, while in Japan, ESG investment has grown dramatically in recent years. In principle, ESG investment can help to bridge the gap between profit-driven investment and economic and social sustainability in Asia and the Pacific. However, a number of challenges, such as unclear and varied sustainable investment criteria, untested impacts on corporate value and social issues, and the lack of quality data cloud the potential for increasing ESG investment. This book aims to contribute to developing a framework for future analysis and monitoring to ensure the growth of ESG investment.

This book draws on the expertise of faculty and colleagues at the Balsillie School of International Affairs to both locate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a contribution to the development of global government and to examine the political-institutional and financial challenges posed by the SDGs. The contributors are experts in global governance issues in a broad variety of fields ranging from health, food systems, social policy, migration and climate change. An introductory chapter sets out the broad context of the governance challenges involved, and how individual chapters contribute to the analysis. The book begins by focusing on individual SDGs, examining briefly the background to the particular goal and evaluating the opportunities and challenges (particularly governance challenges) in achieving the goal, as well as discussing how this goal relates to other SDGs. The book goes on to address the broader issues of achieving the set of goals overall, examining the novel financing mechanisms required for an enterprise of this nature, the trade-offs involved (particularly between the urgent climate agenda and the social/economic goals), the institutional arrangements designed to enable the achievement of the goals and offering a critical perspective on the enterprise as a whole. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals makes a distinctive contribution by covering a broad range of individual goals with contributions from experts on governance in the global climate, social and economic areas as well as providing assessments of the overall project – its financial feasibility, institutional requisites, and its failures to tackle certain problems at the core. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of international affairs, development studies and sustainable development, as well as those engaged in policymaking nationally, internationally and those working in NGOs.

The concept of sustainable development was described in the United Nations’ 1987 Bruntland Commission Report as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This new volume presents an eclectic selection of chapters that aim to integrate social, economic, and environmental objectives. Through studies and research, the book presents the concept of sustainable development in various manifestations along with its challenges and advantages, looking at sustainability in business, manufacturing, finance, etc. It explores how new financial technology (or Fintech) can help foster sustainable finance and the role of digitization and AI in achieving sustainability goals. It considers the importance of cultural sustainability and presents sustainability-promoting strategies affecting the environment, such as addressing the mitigation of marine plastic pollution and reusing plastic waste to make eco-bricks. Other topics include development of sustainable smart cities, a case study of sustainability at the local level, such as marigold cultivation for socio-economic sustainability, and more.

This book provides a wealth of information and a critically required framework for sustainable automobile policy development in major Asian countries. It also gives wide-ranging policy options, ranging from technological to institutional solutions to automobile emission problems, based on empirical case studies and comparative policy and regulatory analysis. It is a useful reference with valuable insights on how rapidly changing economies are adopting their policy and regulatory structures to cope with the progressively severe environmental impacts of automobile increase.