On Wednesday, April 29th, ISET hosted Mr. Donghyun Park, Asian Development Bank’s Principal Economist at Economics and Research Department. Mr. Park presented recently published ADB's Asian Development Outlook (ADO) 2015 Theme Chapter “Financing Asia’s Future Growth”. ADO is the annual flagship report of the Asian Development Bank.

In the presentation, Mr. Park explained the role of a sound and efficient financial system in sustaining the region’s future growth. He started by explaining the existing dichotomy in Asian countries: many Asian countries (e.g. South Korea) have world-class manufacturing sectors, while the financial sector is relatively underdeveloped.

As Mr. Park stated, after the global financial crisis the growth rate of Asian countries, as well as in the rest of the world, slowed down, thus developing a financial system became crucial for many countries. Mr. Park presented research that confirms that financial development does boost economic growth.
In the second part of the presentation, Ms. Kathie Julian, ADB country director in Georgia, provided some information about the mission and project of ADB in Georgia. Ms. Julian mentioned the issuance of Lari denominated bond, issued by ADB this February to provide long-term capital to the economy and support improvement of the domestic bond market.

The presentation was followed by a Q&A session. ISET would like to thank Mr. Park for giving a very informative and interesting presentation to the ISET community.