The leafy, tranquil compounds of the Asian Development Bank have the feeling of a university. The Manila headquarters of the anti-poverty institution indeed is brimming with ex-academics, and the place has a very think-tank-like atmosphere. Unfortunately, the ADB shares another feature that is common among university faculties: a tendency towards petty political squabbles. Anyone familiar with the goings-on of university departments would be immediately struck by how presumably intelligent and thoughtful professors, who have committed...Read more
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One year after the report of the Eminent Persons Group, the Asian Development Bank has seen its share of shake-ups. The US has made noise about Japan’s strong influence in the body and the agency’s “strategic direction”; staffers have quit and others face layoffs. As the bank embarks on its new long-term strategic framework the institution is having a long, soulful look at its role in the region.
Water sanitation is among the most elemental and effective health initiatives undertaken by the Asian Development Bank. Their programmes are strikingly effective at improving health and reducing famine – clear water is an essential element of life. And, in a region of exploding population growth and ever growing stresses on the environment, water has never been such an important issue.
The ADB has been wrestling with the Asian local bond market initiative for decades. Their efforts seem to be finally paying off, with the domestic ringgit, renminbi and Japanese Samurai markets in particular taking off in recent times. The ADB says more needs to be done, and recites the list of necessary reforms.
It has been an extraordinary 12 months for the Asian Development Bank. It has digested the report of the Eminent Persons Group, it has mapped out an ambitious new strategy through to 2020, and it has weathered the most intense level of politics and internal dissent of its 41-year history. ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda talks to IFR Asia’s Jasper Moiseiwitsch about the bank’s big year.
Vietnam is in the middle of a landmark shift from being a frontier outpost of great potential, to a market sufficiently developed to have become an essential location for foreign banks and investors. However, like all big transitions, the development is involving some pain.
The Asian Development Bank is pushing heavily into public-private partnership investments in infrastructure. The shift reflects an increasing realisation that private capital drives Asian growth. If the ADB wants to be relevant, it has to work with private funding, explains S Chander, ADB’s deputy director general, private sector operations department, to IFR Asia’s Jasper Moiseiwitsch.
In one corner: Asia’s vast savings pools. In the other: Asia’s equally vast infrastructure spending needs. Increasingly the ADB has looked to play middleman, to put in play massive reservoirs of private capital to address the region’s urgent development needs.
Finance can be abstract, but the recent food shortages that have hit Asia have given concepts like global trade, inflation and commodity prices a real human dimension to current global credit market problems and commodity price rises.
How effective has the Asian Development Bank been at nurturing a regional bond market? By certain measures, spectacularly successful – domestic debt issuance has soared over the past nine months. However, that market growth has just invited more questions about whether the ADB has much of a meaningful role to play in its longstanding pet project of building local debt financing solutions for local financing needs.