Agenda

Participants

Presentations

“Assessing Development Strategies to Achieve the MDGs in Asia and the Pacific” is a project aimed at evaluating and recommending various strategic options that would ensure the timely achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in a select number of countries in the Asia and Pacific region. Empirical investigations of MDG costing and financing are planned, using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling as the anchoring methodology. A combination of the latter with methods at the micro level is expected to enable proper analysis of the determinants of MDG achievement, on the one hand, and the effect of achieving goals in education, health, and water and sanitation on poverty and income inequality, on the other.

To initiate the project's activities with a first-tier group of 5 countries (i.e., Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan) and with other countries of the region as observers, the inception and first training workshop was organized on 20-22 August, 2008 in Bangkok. This first workshop was organized by the Development Policy and Analysis Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA/DPAD), the UNDP Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific (UNDP/RBAP) and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP) in close collaboration with the UNDP Regional Centre in Colombo (RCC).

The main objectives of the workshop were to:

• introduce the project's objectives and methodology;
• familiarize participants with the intended outcomes of the project and their potential uses, in terms of country-study results, policymaking, and sustainability of capacity-building;
• provide country teams with an initial training in the project's methodology
• identify prerequisites for the successful implementation of the project, particularly regarding country-team organization and data availability and compilation;
• identify needs for tailoring the methodology to country-specific conditions, and
  define the milestones and timeframe of the project.