Scaling Up Poverty Reduction: Lessons and Challenges from China, Indonesia, Korea and Malaysia

China, Indonesia, Korea, and Malaysia have improved their indicators of well-being: life expectancy, infant mortality, school enrolments, incidence of poverty-at a faster rate than virtually any other developing countries. In three decades, these four East Asian countries lifted more people out of poverty than all other developing countries combined.

Case studies on these countries have been prepared by local researchers for the Shanghai Conference of May 25-27, 2004, to help understand and draw lessons about their accomplishments. The report prepared by N. Robert Zagha and Oleksiy Shvets from the World Bank's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, builds on these studies and other sources to put these country experiences in a broader perspective, highlighting three features of their success: growth that has been not only rapid but, more importantly, sustained over time; prosperity that has been shared; and institutions that strike a balance between stability and adaptation to the changing needs of increasingly sophisticated, urbanizing and globalizing societies.

  Download the full Report (165kb pdf)
  Download the case summary: Korea: Four Decades of Equitable Growth (14kb pdf)