The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the crucial role of vaccines in public health management and economic recovery. Its worldwide impact has raised national security concerns and implications on health policies, particularly on Asia Pacific countries’ readiness to cope with the next pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of national, regional, and global vaccine research and development (R&D) systems. Translating public and private R&D efforts into effective vaccines in a timely manner requires not only sufficient financial and scientific resources but also a policy-driven R&D ecosystem that fosters innovation, public-private partnerships, and international cooperation.
Food loss remains one of the central points of collective action around the world, as reflected in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, but this issue is far more concerning for the developing countries. Several studies highlight the level and stages of food losses. However, there is limited work on understanding the food losses in the context of international trade.
In Asia-Pacific, over the last few decades, countries have focussed on improving their healthcare sector and have been trying to achieve the targets set by SDG 3 – Ensure Healthy Lives and Promote Wellbeing for All at All Ages, and SDG 17 – Partnership for the Goals. Yet there are still considerable gaps across the countries, in terms of access to healthcare services and per capita healthcare expenditure.
In this paper, we review the sustainable development content of regional trade agreements (RTAs) globally using a new ESCAP RTA Text Analysis tool, followed by a comparative analysis of sustainable development related provisions in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and two other recent “mega” regional trade agreements (RTAs), namely the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the European Union – Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EU – Japan EPA).
This study attempts to analyse the economy wide impact of Indo-Pacific alliance between India and rest of the 45 participating countries. We introduce four simulation scenarios in the general equilibrium model. First scenario is the one in which India bilaterally liberalizes trade in terms of tariffs liberalization alone and then removal of tariffs and reduction of non-tariff barriers together with all the countries of Indo-Pacific region. Second scenario is when India bilaterally liberalizes trade with all the Asian countries of the Indo-Pacific region.
In light of the spread of Covid-19 cases in India during the second wave, the Government of India (GOI) decided to negotiate for an IPR waiver under section 1 (copyright and related rights), 4 (industrial designs), 5 (patents), and 7 (protection of undisclosed information) of TRIPS Agreement under the World Trade Organization (WTO). The expectation of the GOI is that the proposed IPR waiver would allow more firms to come forward to manufacture vaccines, medicines, and other COVID-19 related medical items, which would in turn augment their availability at an affordable price.
Over the last three years, trade tensions between the United States (US) and China have transformed a fairly open bilateral trading environment into a rather protectionist one. The new administration of the United States has maintained most of the bilateral tariffs and non-tariff barriers put in place by the previous administration. Moreover, incentives to diversify trade partners and localisation have been intensified following COVID-19-induced global supply-chain disruptions.
In this paper, we utilize ESCAP (2020)’s framework of Digital and Sustainable Regional Integration Index version 1 (DigiSRII 1.0) to uncover digital economy integration trends across Asia-Pacific region. The results show that Asia and the Pacific has progressed well on conventional digital economy integration, especially due to significant improvements on digital-economy infrastructure and ICT goods trade liberalization.