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This study was prepared by the Rural Development, Natural Resources and Environment Unit (EASRE) of the East Asia and Pacific Region. The World Bank's Environment and Social Development Strategy for the region provides the conceptual framework for setting priorities, strengthening the policy and institutional frameworks for sustainable development, and addressing key environmental and social development challenges through projects, programs, policy dialogue, non-lending services, and partnerships.

The economic justification for public expenditure is especially strong in the case of environmental management. Yet expenditures on environmental management have received little attention in public expenditure reviews by the World Bank and other international development organisations. An initial analysis of environmental expenditures in the Indonesian government budget between FY1994/95 and FY1998/99 yields four basic findings. First, most spending in the nominal environmental sector, sector 10 (Environment and Spatial Planning), is on non-environmental activities, and much environmental expenditure occurs in other budget sectors. Second, environmental expenditures fell sharply in real terms during the economic crisis, to levels far below those in FY94/95. Third, they also fell sharply relative to the budget and to GDP. Finally, environmental expenditures declined more in Indonesia during the economic crisis than in Malaysia, Thailand and Korea, relative to both the budget and GDP.

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We apply statistical techniques from natural language processing to a collection of Western and Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper articles spanning the years 1998-2020, studying the difference and evolution of its portrayal. We observe that both content and attitudes differ between Western and Hong Kong-based sources. ANOVA on keyword frequencies reveals that Hong Kong-based papers discuss protests and democracy less often. Topic modeling detects salient aspects of protests and shows that Hong Kong-based papers made fewer references to police violence during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. Diachronic shifts in word embedding neighborhoods reveal a shift in the characterization of salient keywords once the Movement emerged. Together these raise questions about the existence of anodyne reporting from Hong Kong-based media. Likewise, they illustrate the importance of sample selection for protest event analysis.