The Economist Europe – July 22-28, 2017

The EconomistJuly 22nd 2017 19

For daily analysis and debate on Asia, visit

Economist.com/asia

1

T

HE young woman with the micro-

phone cajoles, hectors and wheedles

customers with the breathless enthusiasm

of a livestock auctioneer at a county fair.

She is standing behind a table stacked high

with blue jeans; most of the milling crowd

is dressed in lungyis, Myanmar’s skirt-like

national dress. The fancy mall around

them is anchored by a huge department

store, dotted with banks and mobile-

phone stalls and topped bya cinema and

video arcade.

Myanmar has been growing so fast—by

an average of 7.5% a year for the past five

years—that the boom is reverberating in

Mae Sot, just acrossthe border in Thailand.

Two years ago, says a longtime resident,

the site of the mall was a swamp, and Mae

Sot was a poky little border town with two

small grocery stores. Today huge super-

markets, car dealers, electronics outlets

and farm-equipment showrooms line the

wide new road from the border into town,

patronised by a steady stream of Burmese

shoppers. Skeletons of future apartment

blocks loom; the Thai government is build-

ing a new international airport. The Asian

Development Bank (ADB) forecasts that

Myanmar’s growth will hit 8% next year.

The region is full of such stories. Cam-

bodia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam

have been growing only slightly more

nally communist Laos and Vietnam and

autarkic Myanmar all embraced free mar-

kets, up to a point. The days of nationalisa-

tion and central planning seem to be over.

In much of the region inefficient and codd-

led state-owned businesses endure, and

rent-seeking, corruption and protection-

ism are all more common than they should

be. But across South-East Asia, liberal eco-

nomics has won the argument.

Politically, however, the region is mov-

ing in the opposite direction. The Asian cri-

sis may have brought huge economic hard-

ship, but it did at least unseat Suharto,

Indonesia’s strongman of 32 years, and in-

stigate political reforms elsewhere. In the

years that followed, imperfect democra-

cies in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thai-

land appeared to be gaining strength. And

Myanmar, after years of isolation and re-

pression, embarked on an unexpected

transition to democracy.

But hoped-for openings never came in

Laos and Vietnam, where the Communist

Party has always been nakedly repressive.

Singapore remains an illiberal, albeit effec-

tive, technocracy. The leaders of Malaysia

and Cambodia, Najib Razak and Hun Sen,

have proved depressingly adept at locking

up critics and persecuting opponents.

Cambodia’s mostprominent opposition

politician, Sam Rainsy, lives in exile to

avoid imprisonment for a spurious convic-

tion for defamation. Opposition figures in

Malaysia find themselves in court on char-

ges as varied as corruption and sodomy.

The junta that seized power in Thailand

three years ago promises an election next

year. Even in the unlikely event that it is

free and fair, the constitution—which the

army wrote and the new king signed in

May—creates a junta-led Senate, imposes

slowly. Overall, the ten countries of the As-

sociation of South-East Asian Nations

(ASEAN) grew at an annual rate of 5% over

the past five years: not quite as fast as Chi-

na or India, but much faster than Europe,

Japan or America. The region’s 625m-odd

people are growing richer and better edu-

cated; they will live longer, healthier and

more prosperous lives than their parents.

Of course, plenty of poverty remains—

most people in Myanmar are still subsis-

tence farmers—but the region’s economic

trends are promising.

Back from the red

It was not always obvious that the South-

East Asian economies would do so well.

Only a generation ago Myanmar was cut

off from the world by despotic generals;

Cambodia’s 25-year-old civil war was still

sputtering; and Vietnam wasonly just be-

ginning to experiment with some timid

market reforms. The wealthier countries in

the region, meanwhile, had seen their

economies, and the underlying models of

growth, shattered by the Asian financial

crisis of1997.

The crisis proved salutary. Indonesia,

the Philippines and Thailand all adopted

sounder macroeconomic policies and

made some effort to curb the cronyism that

had accompanied earlier growth. Nomi-

South-East Asia

More money, less freedom

MAE SOT

The region’s future looks prosperous but illiberal

Asia

Also in this section

20 Intolerance in Indonesia

21 A push for fairness in South Korea

22 Banyan: Fighting jihadists in the

Philippines