The book explores recent drivers and factors of socio-economic development, in particular Global Value Chains and digital technologies, with analysis of 39 regional economies in Asia plus Australia and New Zealand.

The editors provide an overview of growth, productivity and structural change trends in Asia over the past two decades, using a database (https://dataverse.nl/dataverse/innovation_and_structural_transformation_database) covering a wide range of Asian economies from 1990-2020 across four key areas: productivity and structural change, global value chains (GVCs), economic complexity, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The book offers insights into current economic performance and future prospects and shows great heterogeneity across the region highlighting a range of development experiences. Each chapter contains an accessible methodological section of the database in use, explaining the construction of indicators and how they should be interpreted.

With a novel approach to how economies perform, this book will interest scholars of Asian economics, development economics, and productivity studies. The publicly available database will also appeal to policymakers and researchers interested in data analysis.