A poor family in Vietnam’s southernmost Ca Mau Province.

Governments in Asia should look to expand social safety nets that can both protect the poor and help spur economic growth, the Asian Development Bank said in a statement Monday.

The three-day conference is organized by the ADB, the Vietnamese and Chinese governments and the secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Kuroda stressed that the crisis should be seen as an opportunity to take proactive measures that lay the groundwork for inclusive and sustainable development over the long-term. “Crises such as this one provide the chance to initiate structural reforms for social development.”

Protecting against huge health expenditures, for example, helps the poor directly, but also benefits the economy as people with less need for large “precautionary savings” are likely to increase consumption, or save and invest more productively, Kuroda said.

The ADB’s estimates show that if the region’s growth had not been stalled by the crisis over the past year, there would be 60 million fewer people living below the US$1.25 a day poverty line.

While the crisis decimated jobs across income lines, Asia’s poor have been especially hard hit, in part because of a lack of adequate social safety nets to cushion their fall from the slowdown in economic activity, the bank said in the statement.

Many governments have implemented multibillion-dollar stimulus measures to deal with the crisis but these have focused more on infrastructure and tax cuts than social services, AFP quoted a paper prepared for the conference as saying.

Kuroda said in the long run the key challenge for developing Asia will be to enhance its resilience to external shocks.

“It can do so through policies aimed at broadening the scope and structure of the region’s openness and strengthening national systems that support human development.”

Source: Thanh Nien