6 - Development in Southeast Asia's Lagging Regions

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Southeast Asia is a significant part of the world. It accounts for approximately 3 per cent of the world's land mass and in 2013, the population was approximately 600 million. In these two respects it is similar to Latin America. In 2003, Latin America's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was approximately three times that of Southeast Asia. However, Southeast Asia's economy has been growing much faster than Latin America's. In real terms, the GDP of Southeast Asia grew at an average annual rate of approximately 5.5 per cent in the four decades up to 2014, while over the same period the Latin American economy grew at an annual rate of 3.1 per cent. In fact, the only other parts of the world of comparable size and population that have grown faster than Southeast Asia are China since the late 1970s and India since the early 1990s (World Bank 2014).

At this rate of growth, Southeast Asia's economy has almost doubled every ten years. Southeast Asia has also become much wealthier. Its average GDP per capita has increased from approximately US$500 in the early 1980s to approximately US$3,500 in the mid-2010s. The level of poverty has also declined. For example, based on the country poverty line, the percentage of poor people in Thailand declined from approximately 58.1 per cent in 1990 to approximately 12.6 per cent in 2012; in Indonesia, from approximately 23.4 per cent in 1999 to approximately 11.4 per cent in 2013; and in the Philippines, from approximately 26.6 per cent in 2006 to approximately 25.2 per cent in 2012 (World Bank 2014). Southeast Asia has definitely been one of the most dynamic regions in the world with plenty of development success stories. In general, it has demonstrated the merits of more open economic policies à la the Washington consensus (Hill 2013; Coxhead 2015).

Despite this growth, levels of development between and within these countries vary greatly. With respect to inter-country differences, for example, Malaysia's GDP per capita in 2013 was approximately US$10,000, which is more than four times that of Vietnam. Within countries, for example in Indonesia, the percentage of poor people in Papua in 2012 was 31 per cent, while it was only 4 per cent in Bali (BPS 2014).