What Happened to Myanmar?:
While the ultimate objective is to expand the trade and investment relationships with East and South East Asia, it remains geographically true that just as the North Eastern Region cannot thrown away, Myanmar too cannot be wished away in this context.
So it is imperative that in our discussion, we try to appreciate the economic realities of Myanmar as well. Myanmar's is a case of immense potential gone awry and a country now trying to come out of its economic malaise.
In Manipur, we all grew up in the fifties and sixties of the last century under the impact of all our elders talking about Burma
[9] Oil, and we still talk of it to identify the oil stations.
But as time passes and we continue to explore what has happened to our childhood country of development and country of kitchen as well as bed-room (his)stories of relationships (including wars), we cannot but help wondering.
In the mid 1950s, Myanmar "...was perhaps the only developing country (although that term came into prominence later) that was an exporter of food and fuel, having been the world's largest exporter of rice before World War II, and a supplier of oil, especially to India.
It had untapped, even unexplored, natural resources. It contained about 75 percent of the world's teak reserves, and had vast other timber potential.
Its population in relation to its land base was the most favorable of any continental Southeast Asian country. It contained a natural communications network through the Irrawaddy River (Kipling's Road to Mandalay) and its tributaries.
Literacy was high; the use of English was widespread, thus international communications were relatively easy. The Economist, years later, pointed out that Rangoon, along with Manila, in that period would have been considered the model urban areas of Asia's future.
The Burmese seemed to have absorbed a good bit of the British parliamentary experience of the colonial era with reasonably good results."
[10]
This was what Myanmar was about half a century back. This was also the country which Schumacher had in mind as the model when he wrote his classic
[11] . But today the country is one of the fifty least developed countries of the world identified by the United Nations as so on the basis of low income, human assets and economic vulnerability
[12] .
Among the least developed countries, it has got one of the lowest domestic savings rate and capital formation (Table 3).
It is also one of the 24 least developed countries where the economically active population outside of agriculture is expected to continue growing faster than economically active population within agriculture as up to 2010 for which projections have been made by the United Nations.
This is happening in country where the labour force in agriculture constitutes about 70 per cent of the total labour force. But all this is happening in a country where there has been a decline in the share of the manufacturing sector (Table 4).
Table 3:
Gross Capital Formation and Domestic Savings of Least Developed Countries.
Table 4
Average Annual Growth Rates and GDP Shares of the Manufacturing Sector in the Least Developed Countries (Percentages)
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| Footnotes |
Amar Yumnam, a visiting Scholar at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, contributes regularly to e-pao.net . This article was a seminar presentation on "Indo Myanmar Socio-Economic and Trade Relationships" oragnized by 'Indo Myanmar Fraternal Alliance'. He can be contacted at [email protected] . This article was webcasted on December 10th 2006.
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