InAsia

Covid Lays Bare The Flaws in Asia's Megacities

August 19, 2020 The Asia Foundation
InAsia
Covid Lays Bare The Flaws in Asia's Megacities
Show Notes Transcript

After 20 years of dazzling growth, Asia is now home to nearly half of the world’s urban population. But this breakneck growth has often bypassed critical investments in public infrastructure. Now, the Covid-19 pandemic is exposing pervasive failures of urban governance that are already starting to exact serious costs. But like pandemics past, the coronavirus crisis is also an opportunity to rethink and reshape Asian cities. Read our most recent blog: https://asiafoundation.org/2020/08/19/covid-lays-bare-the-flaws-in-asias-booming-megacities/

John Rieger (00:00):

Welcome to InAsia, from the Asia Foundation. I'm John Rieger.

Tracie Yang (00:03):

And I'm Tracie Yang.

John Rieger (00:04):

After 20 years of dazzling growth Asia is now home to nearly half of the world's urban population as hundreds of millions of people have flocked to the region's booming megacities.

Tracie Yang (00:15):

But too often, amid this breakneck growth the lack of public infrastructure has left behind the very citizens whose toil has built Asia's prosperity. Now, there's a reckoning afoot in the form of COVID-19.

John Rieger (00:29):

In an essay in this week's InAsia blog authors Nicola Nixon, Madakini Surie and Kim McQuay argue that pervasive failures of urban governance exposed by the pandemic are already starting to exact serious costs. Nicola Nixon joins us now via the intertubes of course, from her home in Hanoi. She's the Asia Foundation's director of governance. Nicola, welcome to the show.

Nicola Nixon (00:51):

Thank you, John. Thank you, Tracie.

John Rieger (00:53):

What's it like in Hanoi this morning?

Nicola Nixon (00:55):

It's lovely in Hanoi this morning. It's bright and sunny and it's going to be warm but not too warm.

John Rieger (01:01):

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Tracie Yang (01:03):

Nicola, your essay states very bluntly that poverty in Asia is going to rise. Why is that?

Nicola Nixon (01:11):

It's largely the effect of the pandemic. COVID-19 has caused a massive economic slowdown globally and so that's also impacting on this region. The region here however, is already slightly more fragile than other regions, say for example, Europe, because of the high levels of informal labor. There's informal labor, there's a high level of vulnerability to poverty.

Nicola Nixon (01:36):

So while the numbers of actual poor have gone down over the last two decades the numbers of vulnerable to poverty have stayed fairly steady. So the impact of an economic slowdown, massive loss of jobs, collapse of major sectors, particularly tourism. There's an enormous amount of tourism throughout Asia. All of this is going to have longterm knock-on impacts that are going to produce a much larger number of poor.

John Rieger (02:04):

So it says here that you and your colleagues just completed a rapid assessment of social welfare for the ASEAN secretariat. How have you seen these large scale economic disruptions playing out on the ground?

Nicola Nixon (02:16):

Mainly in terms of a high level of uncertainty. People are uncertain about their jobs. So for example across ASEAN, 10 countries in ASEAN, you've got up to 70-80% of the labor market in informal labor. That means that people don't have job contracts, they don't have any kind of job security and most of them, they don't actually have any kind of insurance either. Now these are the easiest jobs to shed if you're a business because you don't have any legal requirements to worry about looking after the person that's losing their job.

Nicola Nixon (02:48):

So across the board a high level of insecurity in informal labor and that plays out in particular areas. The tourism market has largely collapsed, so anyone who was working in tourism is now struggling to eke out a living, particularly if they were in the lower paid levels of the tourism sector.

Nicola Nixon (03:09):

I was talking to a street seller in Hoi An. She sells jewelry as she walks along the beach and she said that her income is down to about 80% since the pandemic hit and she spends her time hoping that the plane ... she said as soon as the planes start again that then tourism will start up again and maybe there'll be some people to sell her wares to.

Nicola Nixon (03:32):

And we see this across the board in that particularly street sellers, street hawkers, informal food stalls, all of these keep being impacted, particularly when a lockdown comes and then everyone has to stay at home. And it's that level of the informal labor market that's very, very badly impacted.

Tracie Yang (03:54):

Nicola, how do your rapid assessment findings in ASEAN compare to other Asian cities?

Nicola Nixon (04:00):

I guess to some extent the ASEAN region, the 10 countries of ASEAN, haven't necessarily been impacted as intensively as some of the other parts of Asia. Now that's except for Philippines and Indonesia. And in fact, you can really see a strong diversity across the ASEAN countries between say for example, the impact at the moment on Cambodia and Laos where there's a very low level of infections and similarly in Vietnam, across then to Indonesia and Philippines where cases are increasing rapidly at the moment.

Nicola Nixon (04:35):

And then you can also compare that to cities such as Delhi or Mumbai in India where the warning that the city was going to go into a lockdown was very sudden and people started leaving and just simply walking home.

John Rieger (04:51):

That was actually shocking.

Nicola Nixon (04:53):

Really, really disturbing scenes. People were walking along train tracks. You'd have whole families walking along the road and just this sense of the rejection from the city, that these weren't really city inhabitants. They're not really city residents. They didn't really have a sense of belonging. They were just going to walk for hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers to get home. This is a really strong indication that cities aren't providing the services that a lot of people need.

Nicola Nixon (05:23):

And another dimension of the challenges of urban governance in the region is that over the years we really see this intense inequality epitomized within cities between the really flashy central business districts in every city and in the peri-urban areas you've got really high dense populations living in very poor quality housing on very low incomes. So the cruelty of social distance pronouncements when people are crowded together and the fact is you can't social distance when you're living so close to others and when quite often you don't have access to decent sanitation services.

John Rieger (06:06):

Let me ask a cynical question here.

Nicola Nixon (06:09):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Rieger (06:10):

Many people on the bottom rung of society seem to be suffering terribly. Does this matter to the rest of society? What do they have to lose?

Nicola Nixon (06:21):

Inequalities, and this is where you've got to thank the World Bank for finally getting there. The inequalities are actually really bad for economic growth. If you're going to allow a very large number of people to become much, much poorer so you end up reducing your middle class in the middle, you're actually going to slow down your potential for economic growth.

Nicola Nixon (06:39):

But these are busy, tight knit up and coming cities across Asia that where people do care a lot and you particularly find there's a really strong spirit of interest and engagement in producing better societies and better ways of living among young people. There's a real energy there and I do think that particularly a lot of interested, engaged and often quite highly educated young people really do care.

Tracie Yang (07:09):

So then what are some policies that these Asian megacities can introduce now to address these inequalities?

Nicola Nixon (07:16):

Across developing Asia there's often very good policies. There's often very good legislation, words on paper, words in reports, words on documents. The implementation gap is the challenge that a lot of [inaudible 00:07:35] of Asia face where it's just the institutions aren't there and the systems and the structures to be able to implement what are pretty good policies.

Nicola Nixon (07:43):

But some of the policy areas that we are seeing a lot of energy going into at the moment and this is where we've seen from the ASEAN study that we're just working on with the ASEAN secretariat. There is a great level of interest to improve social welfare targeting to be able to get social welfare payments to people who need them most and to really look at the labor market policies in tandem with the education policies to see whether or not people are receiving an education that's going to be relevant to the world of work now and the world of work in the future and how they can change the education policies and labor policies, labor market policies, to enable more people to get jobs. But this will take a lot of energy and some different ways of doing things across Asian governments and particularly city governments across Asia.

John Rieger (08:33):

Nicola Nixon, thank you for joining us.

Nicola Nixon (08:35):

Thanks, John. Thanks, Tracie.

Tracie Yang (08:37):

And that's all for our podcast this week. You can read Nicola's thought provoking essay in this week's blog. Until next time, I'm Tracie Yang.

John Rieger (08:45):

And I'm John Rieger.

Tracie Yang (08:46):

Thanks for listening.