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The political upheavals in the Union of Myanmar in 1988/89 precipitated many changes in the political, social, and economic sectors. The country is now at a critical crossroad in its history and development. This study on Myanmar's options in terms of restructuring its economy is therefore useful and timely. The papers in this volume attempt to identify the major issues concerning the role of the state and economic management, the new directions in resource, agricultural and industrial development and the challenges arising from the opening up of the economy to the stimuli of external trade and capital movements.
The grim state of the Myanmar economy in the second half of the 1980s forced the previous government of the Burma Socialist Programme Party to liberalize its external and internal trade. Since the military coup following political chaos in the later part of 1988, Japan, the European Community and the United States have suspended new economic aid to Myanmar. This has led to the present military government, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), to work towards closer cooperation in diplomatic and trade relations with other Southeast Asian countries and to further liberalize its trade sector. This study explores and analyzes Myanmar's external trade and its trade relations with Southeast Asian nations, many of which are members of the Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN), and raises issues and prospects of economic cooperation with neighbouring countries in the region, including the option for active participation in ASEAN.
In late 2004, Myanmar's best known general and long-serving leader of the military regime was suddenly dismissed. This generated widespread uncertainty throughout the country and raised questions about the future. This book addresses some of the issues.
The region's most powerful organisation, ASEAN, is being challenged to ensure security and encourage democracy while simultaneously reinventing itself as a model of Asian regionalism. Ten analysts from six countries address the pressing questions that Southeast Asia faces in the 21st century.
With motivated human resources and a rich natural bounty, Myanmar is expected to take off with sustained growth and eventually attain a unique welfare state. On the basis of the authors’ field surveys and innumerable dialogues with public officials, private professionals, scholars, and others, in addition to intensive desk studies since around 2000, the present volume lays out the essential ingredients for drawing a roadmap to realise the above-mentioned objective. That goal is, specifically, financial development, adequate social capital, indigenous modern manufactures and closer international tie-ups, among others, but above all, sound agrarian development. An effort has been made to place the required ingredients in their historical contexts, as historical experiences constitute an important sociopolitical condition in which development takes place. Myanmar nationals and readers concerned with the country’s economic progress are encouraged to give serious, sustained thought to coming up with a socially supportable roadmap for the country's development path. The present volume provides valuable hints for that purpose.
Since its independence in January 1948, Myanmar has tried to find a way to deal with (at one time) ideologically hostile and traditionally chauvinistic China which has pursued a foreign policy aimed at restoring its perceived influence in Myanmar. To counter China's attempts to influence Myanmar's foreign policy options has always been a challenge for the Myanmar government. Since the 1950s, successive Myanmar governments have realized that Myanmar's bilateral relations with the People's Republic of China should best be conducted in the context of promoting the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the Bandung spirit and the Pauk-Phaw (kinsfolk) friendship. The term Pauk-Phaw is exclusively devoted to denote the special nature of the Sino-Myanmar relationship. This work argues that Myanmar's relationship with China is asymmetric but Myanmar skilfully plays the "China Card" and it enjoys considerable space in its conduct of foreign relations. So long as both sides fulfill the obligations that come under "Pauk-Phaw" friendship, the relationship will remain smooth. Myanmar has constantly repositioned her relations with China to her best advantage. Myanmar's China policy has always been placed somewhere in between balancing and bandwagoning, and the juxtaposition of accommodating China's regional strategic interests and resisting Chinese influence and interference in Myanmar's internal affairs has been a hallmark of Myanmar's China policy. This is likely to remain unchanged.
Focuses on the state's efforts to industrialize Myanmar, first through direct intervention and planning under a socialist economic framework as interpreted by the state leaders (1948-88) and lately (1989 onwards) through state-managed outward orientation.
For many years Myanmar operated an inward-looking economic system built on import substitution. Ultimately this policy failed, leaving behind inefficient state economic enterprises and widespread poverty. Political unrest in 1988 led a newly installed military government to liberalize the economy, opening it to foreign investment and private participation in trade. This move towards a market economy was in line with world-wide trends, but political instability forced the country to follow a course different from neighboring countries. By analyzing economic policies and performance across the economic spectrum, this book presents an overall picture of economic development in Myanmar between 1988 and the early 2000s. The authors synthesize both macro and micro level data to overcome some of the limitations of unreliable national statistics, and show how the government attempted to deal with two key issues it faced. The first was how to reform the inefficient socialistic economic system in conformity with a market economy, and the second was how to develop the agricultural and underdeveloped economy to alleviate mass poverty.
Market liberalization in Myanmar began in 1988 and had some unanticipated consequences. As farmers began to operate in a context with greatly reduced government control, there was an explosion in the production of green gram, which became extremely popular as an export crop. However, market liberalization in the industry surrounding this new export-oriented crop gave rise to growing economic disparities, largely determined by access to land, capital and credit. Ikuko Okamoto explores these issues through a detailed case study of Thongwa Township, a place east of Yangon (Rangoon) in the major green gram producing region in the country. She shows that farmers responded quickly to policy changes and made maximum use of new opportunities, even in a country where socialist policies had previously limited such opportunities. She also traces the consequences for different social groups in rural Myanmar, and shows that traders benefited the most from the new arrangements, and landless laborers the least. Her research offers important insights into the transition from a socialist to a market-based economy, and local-level responses to market incentives. It also shows that the success or failure of new crops in a peasant economy largely depends on whether the crop is compatible with the initial resource endowment.
Why has Myanmar (Burma), a country rich in resources - rice, timber, minerals - descended to 'least developed country' status? Is the explanation to be found inside Burma or beyond? Is the failure of development due to political authoritarianism and conflict? Or perhaps the drugs trade is partly to blame? This book contends that all these factors have contributed. But it also maintains that the mismanagement of the country's resources is of equal, or even greater, importance. A clear answer to the question of Burma's developmental failure is sought by focussing upon the misuse of resources in concert with those factors that are more usually emphasized.