7 - Myanmar’s Rural Economy at a Crossroads

Summary

The agricultural sector, the backbone of Myanmar's economy, has long been a stagnant sector. However, in the past four to five years, the sector's position in the national economy has started to change rapidly. In 2014/2015, for the first time in its history, the GDP share of the agricultural sector began to decline such that it became lower than that of the manufacturing sector (CSO 2017). While about 70 per cent of the population still resides in rural areas (CSO 2017), the number of people employed in the agricultural sector also decreased. From 2000 to 2010, it was between 70 per cent and 78 per cent, but it shrank to less than 60 per cent after 2011 (ILO Stat). The share of agricultural exports has also been decreasing consistently from 17.4 per cent in 2009/2010 to 11.8 per cent in 2016/2017 (CSO 2017).

The economic reforms of President Thein Sein since 2011 contributed to these changes in the agricultural sector. Despite many people's pessimistic expectations for any fundamental change, especially at the initial stages of the reforms, the government promoted industrialisation led by foreign direct investment as a key economic development strategy. As a result of other social and political changes occurring at the time, several longstanding controls and regulations were relaxed, from which the agricultural sector was not immune. The NLD government which took power in 2016 followed in the same direction of economic management, while prioritising the agricultural and rural sectors in its policies. This has led to major transformations in various aspects of Myanmar's rural economy.

While deregulation and a broad policy aimed at opening up the economy to foreign investment had been a target of the transition to a market economy under the military regime in the late 1980s, liberalisation in the 1990s and 2000s remained partial. The government controls and regulations rooted in the previous socialist regime were maintained in many respects, partly because the military government at the time wanted to capture the benefit for themselves and partly because they did not have much confidence in allowing the market to work freely.