East Asian economies are expected to register their fifth consecutive year of strong growth in 2006, backed up by a substantial decline in poverty, according to the World Bank's latest East Asia Update launched November 2006.
But on the horizon, growth rates in Transition Economies and Newly Industrialized Economies are expected to slow, reflecting a likely weakening in US growth in 2007 and a consequent drop in exports from East Asia..
Growth and Poverty Reduction. The Update shows that growth in the countries of Emerging East Asia* is likely to reach around 8 percent in 2006, the second strongest pace in the five-year long economic expansion underway in the region. Current estimates also suggest that the number of people in East Asia living on or below $2 a day will fall to around 550 million (or 29.3 percent of the population) in 2006. This 1.5 percentage point drop in the past year means that around 25 million people in the region have emerged from severe poverty since 2005.
The report also has a special focus on the 450 million youth in the region and discusses the challenge of how to prepare this group to become the drivers of future growth.
