This report illustrates why Southeast Asian countries need big data for pandemic recovery to radically transform the delivery of key services such as health care, social welfare and protection, and education. The final of a four-part series, it looks at the impact of COVID-19 on Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand to determine how big data could be an invaluable tool to help governments analyze the challenges they face. It outlines policy reforms and recommendations to help capture the benefits of big data. These include drawing up digital road maps, improving technical infrastructure, increasing data quality, and ramping up training programs to create a skilled workforce to lead the digital transformation.

This report identifies well-established sectors needing transformation or improvement (tourism, agro-processing, and garments), along with evolving sectors with high potential for growth (electronics and digital trade) as Southeast Asian countries hammer out policies to boost post-COVID-19 recovery and secure a greener future. The first in a four-part series, the report looks at the pandemic’s impact on these five sectors across Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand. It identifies reforms and strategies to help core industries recover and grow over the medium term. This report underscores how deepening regional cooperation can help policy makers boost their countries’ COVID-19 recovery and build more resilient economies and societies.

This report explains why Southeast Asian countries need to design pandemic recovery policies that hit both ambitious socioeconomic and environmental goals. The third in a four-part series, the report considers the impact of COVID-19 on Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand to show how a green recovery can help safeguard against future health crises. Analyzing areas including agriculture, cities, and oceans, the report lays out policy measures designed to identify, create, and finance green growth opportunities. It shows how COVID-19 has presented countries with a chance to hit the reset button and build a socially, economically, and environmentally resilient future.

This report shows why Southeast Asian countries need to consider tax reforms after many struggled to finance massive public expenditure programs to combat COVID-19. The second in a four-part series, the report considers the impact of COVID-19 on Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand to lay out steps policymakers can take to create healthier fiscal spaces. It illustrates challenges faced around informality, tax collection, compliance, and progressivity. It emphasizes how preventing fraud, taxing wealth, and introducing environmental levies can help reduce poverty, tackle inequality, and contribute toward more sustainable growth. It is therefore crucial to understand the required policy responses as well as potential technologies that could help expand the tax base, increase tax compliance, and ease the process of paying taxes.

The publication covers the 49 regional members of ADB. It discusses trends in development progress and the challenges to achieving inclusive and sustainable economic growth across Asia and the Pacific. This 53rd edition finds that the COVID-19 pandemic has set back the fight against poverty in the region by at least 2 years. Drawing on data simulations, it concludes that people with less social mobility may experience longer-lasting difficulties in escaping poverty. Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2022 includes a special chapter on how data resilience can be achieved in the wake of pandemic disruptions to the operations of national statistical systems. The publication is complemented by a special supplement, Mapping the Public Voice for Development: Natural Language Processing of Social Media Text Data, which explores how social media text data can be harnessed to help policymakers understand the opinions, ideas, and expectations of the public.

Big data is already being used to measure, monitor, and manage tourism development, but its potential remains to be fully exploited. This report discusses the trends, opportunities, and challenges in using big data and digitalization in the tourism sector. It highlights how big data is being leveraged for COVID-19 recovery and examines its relationship with statistical frameworks to better measure the economic, social, and environmental impact of tourism. Case studies of partnerships in Asia and the Pacific between the public and private sector demonstrate ways to tap big data.

Big data are part of a paradigm shift that is significantly transforming statistical agencies, processes, and data analysis. While administrative and satellite data are already well established, the statistical community is now experimenting with structured and unstructured human-sourced, process-mediated, and machine-generated big data. The proposed SDN sets out a typology of big data for statistics and highlights that opportunities to exploit big data for official statistics will vary across countries and statistical domains. To illustrate the former, examples from a diverse set of countries are presented. To provide a balanced assessment on big data, the proposed SDN also discusses the key challenges that come with proprietary data from the private sector with regard to accessibility, representativeness, and sustainability. It concludes by discussing the implications for the statistical community going forward.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted both supply and demand sides of an interconnected world economy in 2020. Asia and the Pacific was not immune as lockdowns and travel and trade restrictions affected nearly all aspects of cross-border economic activity. This publication examines the initial impact on trade, investment, finance, and people’s mobility across the region as the pandemic struck. It looks at how regional economies individually or collectively respond to the crisis by, for example, leveraging rapid technological progress and digitalization as well as increasing services trade to reconnect and recover. The theme chapter focuses on digital platforms and how they can accelerate digital transformation across the region.