Southeast Asia is getting ready for a swinging year, economically speaking. After several years of subdued growth, the region’s economies, according to the Asian Development Bank, are forecasted to grow at 5.0 percent in 2018 and 5.1 percent in 2019. With that kind of growth, Southeast Asians can expect to see their standard of living, as reflected in their country’s GDP-per-capita figures, rise quickly in the near future.
We’ve seen this happen before. Since rebounding from the Asian financial crisis and, more recently the global financial crisis, Southeast Asian economies have grown at a consistently quick pace. More surprisingly, countries in the region as politically diverse as Indonesia and Vietnam, for example, roughly quintupled their GDP per capita between 2000 and 2016, according to the World Bank.
With the good times returning, this week’s Spotlight centers on two opinion articles, one originating from the Philippines and the other from Thailand, which we think would be helpful to elicit a few reflections on what we can expect in the coming years. The first is whether Southeast Asia’s development will persevere and progress as well as the numbers are telling us. The second question is whether democracy and development are mutually supportive.
A quick walk down any major road of a metropolis in the region will tell you that development is at best unbalanced: see the contrast between the gleaming glass skyscrapers and the nearby slums where many people eke out a hard living, a clear manifestation of the continuing gap between the low- and rising middle- income groups.
Are we misplacing our priorities when it comes to development projects, as pointed out in our first Spotlight article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer? The cri de coeur ruminates on a reflection of Philippine society, when a hungry man can go to prison for a stolen can of corned beef valued at US$0.40. “The problem, therefore, is a question of equal opportunity and access to work that provides a decent way of life,” opines the writer.
Our second Spotlight article, which appeared in The Bangkok Post, looks at the recent, questionable initiative by the Thai government to eliminate extreme poverty in the country—by giving cash to the poor, so they make it above the poverty level. Its author argues, “The solution may not be just handing out money, but creating a level playing field.”
Southeast Asia is home to at least 10 experiments in development, many of them in settings where once promising democracies today show worrying signs of retreating. Many have observed the link between democracy and development: they go hand in hand as one strengthens the other. An effective democracy with an engaged civil society and rule of law has brighter economic prospects because it responds to and obtains the consent of its people to set down the fundamentals of a strong economy.
However, while non-democratic regimes in the region may seem to be as successful as democracies fostering development, we must not mistake the form of democracy for its substance. Very few societies in Southeast Asia are democratic in the full sense of the word: an election does not a democracy make. Whatever evidence one may conclude from development and democracy in Southeast Asia, it may just be too early to conclude that development does not need democracy.
