FIAS » Regions » East Asia & the Pacific

East Asia & the Pacific

Despite slowing growth in exports to the United States, rising volatility in global financial markets, high and unstable international commodity prices, and uncertainty in the world economy, countries in East Asia and the Pacific continued to show strong overall growth, including in low-income economies such as Cambodia, Lao PDR, Mongolia, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.

FIAS work in East Asia and the Pacific focuses on the four technical areas of business entry (start-up and licensing), alternative dispute resolution, investment law, and investment promotion.

Examples of our work

In Papua New Guinea, FIAS completed an informal economy study, which identified poor access to markets, weak infrastructure, and the complexity of government processes as the major obstacles to growth of small businesses in the country. The study will serve as a baseline as Papua New Guinea prepares to simplify its business registration and licensing regimes.

In Vietnam, FIAS and IFC Business Advisory Services worked on the Vietnam Land Program. The program addresses barriers at the provincial and national levels to small businesses accessing land. FIAS assisted local governments in the Hue and Bac Ninh provinces in simplifying procedures for acquiring, registering, and developing land. At the national level, FIAS is providing expertise to the government on a new land code.

In Indonesia's frontier region of Aceh, FIAS used a strategic policy planning approach to assist the leadership team of the Aceh Reconstruction Agency. The main goal is to strengthen coordination and prioritization of regulatory reform efforts in view of Aceh’s special autonomy. This will be supported and achieved by reform initiatives at the national level, and the improvement in the overall investment climate.

In the Solomon Islands, FIAS helped establish a new registry which resulted in the lowering of processing time for work permits for highly skilled international labor, a critical resource for both domestic and foreign businesses, from several months to five days. The new registry facilitated a similarly sharp reduction in processing times for the approval of foreign investment applications.

FIAS work in China in FY07 included development of a secured lending framework; value chain analyses of the electronics, pork, and tourism sectors in the western province, Sichuan; the launch of a three-year sub-national Doing Business survey covering 32 cities; and the launch of a three-year project to attract investment to China’s central and western provinces.

In the Philippines, the FIAS' Subnational Doing Business team compared business regulations across 21 Philippine cities in 3 key areas: starting a business, dealing with licenses and registering property—indicators that cover areas of local jurisdiction or practice.

With FIAS assistance, the Lao PDR government began drafting the new investment law in June 2008.