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As the economies of Southeast Asia continue adopting digital technologies, policy makers increasingly ask how to prepare the workforce for emerging labor demands. However, little is known about the skills that workers need to adapt to these changes. Skills profiles in low- and middle-income countries are typically derived from data collected in the United States, which is known to inaccurately reflect their occupational skills. This paper uses online job postings data from Malaysia to identify the digital, cognitive, and socioemotional skills required for digital and non-digital occupations. The skills profiles for each occupation are then merged with labor force survey data from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam to sketch skills profiles of the workforces in these countries. Using descriptive statistics and linear probability model regressions, the paper finds evidence that highly digital occupations require not only digital skills, but also cognitive and socioemotional skills. Similarly, virtually all occupations, regardless of the digital intensity of the job, require some basic or intermediate digital skills. Pairwise correlations and a factor analysis confirm the complementarity between digital skills and different subsets of cognitive and socioemotional skills. The data also confirm that, even with the excitement about the digital revolution, the bulk of employment in Southeast Asia is in low- (around two-thirds) or medium-digital (around one-third) occupations. Only between 1 and 5 percent of jobs are highly digital in the four countries studied. These findings suggest that as education and training systems adapt to teach basic digital skills, they will need to continue to foster cognitive and socioemotional skills.

The objective of this note is to highlight how social protection can help lay the human capital foundations needed for poverty reduction and economic growth in the East Asia and Pacific region while also building, protecting, and deploying the human capital needed to keep up with and take advantage of technological and demographic developments. The note first introduces the human capital development challenge in the region in the context of the World Bank’s Human Capital Project. The note then discusses social protection policies that relate directly to the Human Capital Index, a cross-country indicator of progress on human capital that focuses on the early and school-age years. The final part of the note discusses social protection policies relevant to the broader aim of the Human Capital Project to initiate engagement with client countries about how human capital can be accumulated, protected, and deployed throughout the entire lifecycle. The note considers the potential impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on human capital, but frames the discussion of social protection and human capital broadly to identify implications relevant to the outbreak but also beyond it

The note describes the key challenges facing the health, livelihoods, and mobility of internal and international migrants and their families due to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. The note presents the policy options available to governments to address these challenges and describes the assistance that the World Bank can offer in areas related to social protection and jobs to support these efforts. The living and working conditions of internal and international migrants make them vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 (Coronavirus). Measures put in place to control disease transmission both within and across countries have resulted in significant disruption in transportation networks and in labor markets that have hit migrant workers hard. The resulting decline in remittances will transmit these negative impacts to the families of migrants. Travel restrictions may lead to labor shortages in critical sectors like agriculture that are dominated by migrant workers. While the specific type of support that should be targeted to migrants depends on location, legal status, and type of migration, most migrants will need access to safety nets in the form of cash or in-kind assistance to support them as they comply with transmission control measures and cope with the impacts of the crisis. Policies to support employment retention and promotion will be particularly important as a complement to these safety nets for internal migrants and migrants returning from abroad. Policies to offset the expected declines in remittances will be important for all migrants and their families. Programs created to respond to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak should be migrant-sensitive to take into account the unique challenges facing migrants.

The government of Myanmar is committed to creating new and better jobs, including for migrant workers. In 2018, they introduced the Myanmar sustainable development plan (2018-2030), a national strategy to inform policies and institutions that drive inclusive and transformational economic growth. Goal 3 of that plan focuses on job creation and private sector-led growth, and it includes separate strategies for job creation in rural areas, in industry and services, and in small and medium enterprises (SMEs); another part of goal 3 addresses the need to improve the enabling environment for investment. Protecting the rights and harnessing the benefits of work, including for migrant workers, is likewise addressed in the government’s plan. The ministry of labor, immigration, and population also released two national plans of action that highlight the importance of migration for Myanmar and the need to improve its management.

The movement of people in Southeast Asia is an issue of increasing importance. Countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are now the origin of 8 percent of the world's migrants. These countries host only 4 percent of the world's migrants but intra-regional migration has turned Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand into regional migration hubs that are home to 6.5 million ASEAN migrants. However, significant international and domestic labor mobility costs limit the ability of workers to change firms, sectors, and geographies in ASEAN. This report takes an innovative approach to estimate the costs for workers to migrate internationally. Singapore and Malaysia have the lowest international labor mobility costs in ASEAN while workers migrating to Myanmar and Vietnam have the highest costs. Singapore and Malaysia's more developed migration systems are a key reason for their lower labor mobility costs. How easily workers can move to take advantage of new opportunities is important in determining how they fare under the increased economic integration planned for ASEAN. To study this question, the report simulates how worker welfare is affected by enhanced trade integration under different scenarios of labor mobility costs. Region-wide, worker welfare would be 14 percent higher if barriers to mobility were reduced for skilled workers, and an additional 29 percent if barriers to mobility were lowered for all workers. Weaknesses in migration systems increase international labor mobility costs, but policy reforms can help. Destination countries should work toward systems that are responsive to economic needs and consistent with domestic policies. Sending countries should balance protections for migrant workers with the needs of economic development.

This paper proposes a methodology to prioritize interventions in Peru's road network. A network model is built, linking the country's economic and population centers through indicative corridors, which are defined as the least-cost routes to connect origins to destinations. The network's critical links are identified by systematically simulating disruptions and calculating the costs associated with them. The network is then overlaid with natural hazard layers. The average annual losses associated with the hazard disruptions of the critical links are calculated in many scenarios, including climate change uncertainty and different impacts and reconstruction times. A robust decision-making approach is then used to select interventions that decrease hazard disruption costs.

This background paper was prepared for the East Asia Pacific aging report. The East Asia and Pacific region grew at an unparalleled rate in the past 50 years. This economic boom is partly attributable to unprecedented demographic changes in East Asia during this period. But demographics are only part of the story. The size of the economic bonus or burden which results from population aging depends on how policy influences labor force participation, savings, human capital accumulation and total factor productivity.