IFR Asia: Is there any key agreement you hope to get out of this year’s annual meetings? Kuroda: I hope there will be no difference of opinion as far as medium­and long­term issues are concerned. Climate change, food security and energy security are global issues, and developing countries in Asia must squarely address these. I hope there will be an emerging consensus that developing countries in Asia also certainly need to make significant contributions. Asia has recovered very rapidly – over ha

When the ADB set up the Asia Pacific Disaster Response Fund, first approved in 2009, it marked a shift in focus from long-term reconstruction projects towards more immediate aid. Today, the fund has become an established tool in the bank’s range of financial resources, having already been deployed seven times to provide immediate assistance to countries that declared a major disaster. The shift in focus, however, also hints at a far bigger challenge. Rather than responding after the fact, the AD

The panic that soaring prices triggered in 2008 and the actions taken showed the steps Asia’s governments will take to protect their citizens from sudden jumps in food costs. That is especially true for the price of rice, the staple ingredient for much of the region. The financial crisis may have dissipated fears of price increases three years ago, but a rebound in global commodity prices has put the issue back on the agenda. “The repetition of these food-price hikes has everybody worried,” said

The World Bank recently elevated Vietnam to lower middle-income status after finding its gross national income reached US$1,000 per head in 2009, boosting confidence in the country’s prospects. Economists expect the country to continue to enjoy high growth, with HSBC’s predictions calling for an expansion of 6.8% for 2011, flat to last year’s level. With high growth, however, come high risks. “The risks of financial instability leading to a sharp deterioration of sovereign creditworthiness in an

Infrastructure is central to the ADB’s mandate. Improvements in the region’s infrastructure will accelerate economic growth, improve integration, address climate change and reduce poverty. However, even after the capital increase in 2009, the bank’s own resources fall well short of the investment required. “Increasingly, our emphasis has to be on greater leverage,” said ADB managing director general Rajat Nag. “If the ADB is to be meaningfully engaged in infrastructure development, we need to le

Closer co-operation across Asia’s financial markets is vital to attracting investment from within the fast-growing region. It is also essential if Asia’s financial sector is to keep pace with initiatives that are already linking trading partners across the region. “The integration of Asia’s trade sector is moving faster than that of the financial sector,” said Iwan Azis, head of the ADB’s office of regional economic integration. “Most of the region’s excess liquidity is still invested outside th

IFR Asia: It must be very different running a bank that now has three times the capital. What has changed at the ADB? Nag: Last year, after our general capital increase, was about looking at the commitments we had made to our shareholders and making sure we started to deliver. So, we continued, first of all, with some fairly significant internal changes. Basically, we were going to have to hire about 500 people over a period of three years and you just had to make sure that the new skills and th

Vietnam’s capital city is, in many ways, the perfect setting for this year’s Asian Development Bank annual governors’ meeting. The Hanoi meetings may well be the busiest on record for the ADB, amid expectations of a record turnout of policymakers, academics, finance professionals and other delegates. Although still small in global terms, Vietnam’s economy is a microcosm of many of the issues facing the broader Asian region. The country is expanding rapidly, with GDP growth pegged at 6.8% last ye