Myanmar has a long and difficult road ahead to achieve political stability, democracy and economic development. Hope rests on Aung San Suu Kyi to pull the nation together and lead the reforms after the 2015 election. Are Myanmar’s, and the world’s, expectations too high?
I went to Myanmar recently as part of the ‘young global leaders’ club organised by the World Economic Forum. I saw a country changing fast, full of anticipation but with an uncertain destiny. Yangon, the country’s old capital and commercial hub, illustrates Myanmar’s economic challenges, while Naypyidaw, the eerie new administrative capital, shows its political challenges.
Ramshackle Yangon (formerly Rangoon) almost comes as a shock, so used are we to ultra-modern and gleaming Asian cities. There are no multi-storey department stores, branded coffee shops or air-conditioned office towers. It feels weird to walk through crowded alleys where not a single person is on a mobile phone. Even though the price of a SIM card has come down from $1,000 a couple of years ago to around $60 today, mobile phone penetration in Myanmar is still only 4 per cent (in Thailand: 117 per cent). Internet penetration is even lower.
Myanmar is one of the world’s poorest countries. A quarter of the people live on less than $1.25 a day (though all statistics in Myanmar should be treated with great caution). The McKinsey Global Institute has calculated that even under a best-case scenario in which annual GDP growth doubles, GDP per head (on a PPP basis) would reach only $5,000 in 2030 – roughly where Morocco and Mongolia are today. While other ASEAN economies are thriving on the production of cars, electronics and consumer goods, almost half of Myanmar’s output comes from agriculture. The biggest export items are jade, logs and natural gas.
Training a skilled workforce will take decades: children stay in school for only four years on average, while the higher education system – 164 universities overseen by 13 ministries – is designed to prevent student revolts rather than produce good doctors and engineers. Frequent power-cuts make manufacturing difficult. Logistics are a struggle in the absence of modern road and rail networks. And only North Korea has a less developed banking sector.
But Myanmar offers plenty of opportunities, too. Labour is cheaper than in other Asian countries so Myanmar will attract the garment trade and other low value-added industries. McKinsey thinks that Myanmar could ‘leapfrog’ several stages of development by using digital technology to upgrade education, health-care and finance. Its strategic location between China, India and South East Asia could be attractive to investors. And the country has plenty of natural resources, including vast swathes of fertile land.
The West has lifted almost all economic sanctions. So far, however, potential foreign investors remain cautious: foreign direct investment was a paltry $1.4 billion in the year to April 2013 – though this was a fivefold increase on the previous year, when sanctions were still in force. If economic reforms reached a critical mass, that sum could quickly multiply.
That is a big ‘if’. A visit to Naypyidaw, in the centre of the country, suggests that the political system may not yet be able to sustain ambitious economic reforms. Naypyidaw is military dictatorship set in concrete: a vast expanse of emptiness (the city is seven times the size of Singapore), dotted with enormous official buildings (the parliament is bigger than the Pentagon) and connected by eight-lane highways (24 lanes in front of the presidential palace). These are completely empty – devoid of cars, mopeds or people. Although the government has forced civil servants to relocate and claims (implausibly) a population of 1 million, this place resembles a ghost town.
Other than official palaces and pastel-coloured condominiums for civil servants, Naypyidaw offers little else: a big new airport with few staff and even fewer passengers, a conference centre donated by China, a couple of American-style hypermarkets surrounded by deserted parking lots, a replica of Yangon’s golden Shwedagon pagoda and a zoo with penguins. The city also has a surprisingly large number of hotels, with lots more being built – presumably in preparation for the South East Asian games that Myanmar is hosting later this year and its forthcoming ASEAN chairmanship. But who will stay in them once these events are over?
Some say that the astrologer of Than Shwe, the former military dictator, told him to build the new capital in the middle of nowhere; others that the junta simply wanted an inland capital to avoid an American invasion or bombing (in Naypyidaw the ministerial buildings are several miles apart). Construction began in 2001, in secret. Five years later, the Burmese learnt about the new capital when it appeared on daily weather reports. Naypyidaw makes sure that Myanmar’s people are far removed from their rulers.
The big hope now is that the reform ambitions of President Thein Sein have more substance than the city in which he reigns. Over the last three years, the speed of Myanmar’s democratic opening has been breath-taking: Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from house arrest and her National League for Democracy (NLD) allowed to run in last year’s by-elections; most political prisoners have been set free; press censorship has been lifted; and the blacklist of foreigners and dissidents barred from entering the country has been cut drastically.
However, Myanmar still lacks many of the necessary ingredients for a successful reform programme: policy is made in a haphazard fashion and there is no medium-term roadmap; state administration is weak since civil servants have traditionally been appointed for their loyalty rather than their skills; and levels of corruption are on par with Afghanistan and Sudan.
Investors will stay wary as long as the outcome of the reform process remains uncertain. The army and its cronies, who used to benefit handsomely from Myanmar’s monopolistic and over-regulated economic system, appear resigned to the reforms, but may start pushing back. Perhaps the biggest risks stem from the country’s long-standing ethnic and religious conflicts. Around 60 per cent of the population are Buddhist Burman (or Bamar) people, while the rest are from various ethnic and religious minorities fighting for equality and economic opportunity. The government has now concluded ceasefires with all the armed groups, most recently in May with the Kachin Independence Army in the far north of the country. These conflicts were the cause of and justification for military rule over 60 years. Myanmar will not achieve liberal democracy unless it deals with them in a sustainable way.
The International Crisis Group warns that the ceasefires will fail without first, a political settlement in the shape of a constitution that gives significant autonomy and rights to the minorities; second, a workable plan for integrating the often war-ravaged minority areas (home to 70 per cent of the country’s natural resources) into Myanmar’s economy; and third, an effort to root out the cronyism and crime on which many of the country’s military have flourished.
Then there is the separate issue of the Rohingyas – an oppressed Muslim minority whose origins and right to be in Burma are disputed, unlike those of other ethnic groups. The growing tensions surrounding the Rohingyas have fostered some nasty Buddhist nationalism and violence against Muslims in Myanmar.
Although some journalists and NGOs are speaking out about the need for a comprehensive settlement of the minorities problem, most people react with palpable unease when asked about it. Aung San Suu Kyi hesitated before condemning the violence against the Rohingyas, and when she did, she remained vague and cautious. Her reticence has upset some of her supporters in the West. One person who knows her well says that she is the only person who can unify her nation but that she needs to pick her fights carefully: if she pushes too hard on the minority issue now, her chances of becoming president in 2015 might diminish. Another of Aung San Suu Kyi’s contacts welcomes her transition from “icon to politician”, predicting that as president she would be more courageous on the ethnic minority conflicts than the present government.
At the World Economic Forum in Naypyidaw in early June, Aung San Suu Kyi declared that she would like to run for president in 2015. But this cannot happen unless the government changes the constitution, which prohibits people with foreign spouses and children from running for the office. Aung San Suu Kyi is the widow of the British academic Michael Aris, and her two children have British citizenship. If she is allowed to run and wins, she is almost bound to disappoint, given how enormous Myanmar’s challenges are. “There is perhaps too much hope”, she said in a briefing recently.
Given Aung San Suu Kyi’s iconic image and the sincerity with which Thein Sein seems to be pursuing reform, the West stands ready to help Myanmar with money, advice and trade. The EU has responded sensibly to Myanmar’s opening. It has lifted sanctions in a two-stage process, reinstating the so-called GSP preferences (free market access to goods from poor countries) and widening its aid effort beyond humanitarian programmes. The EU’s priorities – peace, democracy and development – seem right, and probably in that order too. The challenge now is to find ways of turning ambition into reality, including through co-ordination with the US on the one hand and China on the other.
Myanmar is so backward that even ‘capacity building’ – strengthening local administrations and the infrastructure needed to absorb aid programmes – will be difficult. At the same time, there is so much international goodwill that a surge of aid seems inevitable. Among several things that can be done, the EU should help to channel aid towards capacity building. Despite all the difficulties and inevitable disappointments, this is a time and a place where anything is possible.
Katinka Barysch was until recently deputy director of the Centre for European Reform
Friday, July 26, 2013
Monday, July 08, 2013
Don't let England's poujadists kill London's golden goose
One of the UK’s key economic advantages is its success at attracting skilled immigrants. In particular, the ability of London to generate the wealth that Britain depends on to finance its public services is inextricably linked to the city’s openness to ideas, capital and immigrants. But Britain’s immigration debate is now all about how to make it harder for newcomers rather than making the country more attractive to them. To a large extent, this is being driven by the concerns and fears of suburban and rural voters, especially older ones. The readiness of politicians from across the political spectrum to pander to these fears is damaging the economy, feeding euroscepticism and with it the possibility of the UK quitting the EU.
The government wants to reduce net immigration to less than 100,000 a year. To this end it has tightened up the regime for student visas and for skilled immigration into the UK from outside the EU (non-EU countries account for two-thirds of the net immigration: the EU the remainder). There is little the government can do about EU immigrants, which explains the increasingly hysterical campaign to reduce their access to benefits. The government argues that the scale of immigration is prejudicing the employment prospects of lower-skilled British workers (over the last year more than half of new jobs went to immigrants, and youth unemployment is at a record high, ergo they are taking British jobs); placing a further burden on an already overwhelmed National Health Service (NHS) and school system; and leading to abuse of the country’s welfare system.
These claims are either wrong or misleading. Net immigration into the UK is not particularly high. It certainly rose following the opening up of the UK labour market to the new eastern European members of the EU in 2004. Over the 8 years to 2011 net immigration averaged 214,000 a year, before falling to 165,000 in 2012. In the context of a country as populous as the UK, this is a relatively modest inflow – adding about 0.3 per cent to population each year. And it is not especially high in a European context: over the last ten years, net immigration in Britain has been higher than France and Germany, but lower than in Italy or Spain. Talk of ‘mass immigration’ is well wide of the mark.
The UK is also very good at attracting skilled immigrants: almost 40 per cent of first generation immigrants have a university degree; the comparable figures for France and Germany are half that, and even lower for Spain and Italy. Indeed, the south-east of England is home to the biggest concentration of foreign professionals anywhere on earth. The reasons for this success range from the English language to the greater readiness of UK employers to recognise foreign qualifications. Many other first generation immigrants have vocational qualifications in skills like construction, which are in short supply in the UK. Even those in unskilled work are probably not displacing many local workers: these jobs tend to pay at or near the minimum wage – if employers hire immigrants, whose English is sometimes patchy and who often move on quickly, it must be partly because the locals are unwilling to take these jobs.
First generation immigrants tend to live in the most economically dynamic parts of the UK. This is inevitable – immigrants are drawn to where the work and opportunities are. But these areas are also wealthy and dynamic because of their openness. Contrary to popular myth, the areas of greatest immigration are not the ones with the greatest hostility to migration. London, for example, is easily the most tolerant region of the UK. The areas where there is most hostility to immigrants tend to be those where there are fewest immigrants, or where cultural and religious differences are pronounced, as in some northern English towns.
Openness largely explains London’s long renaissance and emergence as the only world city in Europe. It is perhaps the UK’s most precious economic asset. Huge amounts of tax revenue are redistributed from London to the rest of the country. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, one in every five pounds earned in London goes to subsidise other regions of the UK. Without this redistribution (and a smaller but still very large one from the rest of south-east England), the bleak economic prospects of swaths of Britain would be even bleaker. Of course London should be supporting the rest of the UK; it is easily the wealthiest region of the country. But the British government needs to resist popular pressures for controls which would erode London’s ability to generate that wealth.
British politicians need to think about what policies are needed to help London and its environs exploit its unique position. First, they should reverse the cap on student visas. This ill-thought out step has already damaged British universities – one of the country’s most successful export-industries – by making it harder for people to study in the UK. The number of foreign students in Britain is a much envied source of soft power (many either stay or retain long-term links with the country) and export earnings. While other European countries urgently try and attract more foreign students, Britain fashions ways of deterring them.
Second, the government should lift or scrap the caps placed on non-EU skilled immigrants. Given the increasingly fierce global competition for such workers, it is self-defeating to limit the number allowed into the country.
Third, the government should stop stigmatising EU immigrants. There is no evidence of benefit tourism or health tourism. If anything, the reverse is the case; EU immigrants in the UK are on average much younger that UK ones living elsewhere in the EU, and more likely to be in work than the native population. If there is a country in the EU with legitimate cause to resent health tourism, it is Spain, which must cope with large numbers of elderly Britons.
Fourth, it needs to open the way for more construction. The crippling cost of property is now a serious threat to the prosperity of London and the south of England generally; unless action is taken firms will find it increasingly hard to entice people to work there. It will, in turn, be impossible to build these houses unless contractors can rely on imported labour. Britain has an acute shortage of skilled construction workers and there is little indication that the unemployed elsewhere in the country have any desire to do this kind of work in London. There is a reason why London’s building sites are full of Poles rather than Liverpudlians.
How should the government address the rising anti-immigrant feeling that threatens the UK’s economic vibrancy and even its membership of the EU? It can do little about ignorance, other than to stop legitimising it by playing up to it. Instead of scape-goating the migrants that Britain needs, the government should concentrate on addressing the underlying cause of the popular frustration: an acute shortage of affordable housing, even in many economically depressed parts of the country; a lack of vocational training for those that do not go to university, and over-burdened public services. If there is a shortage of primary school places in London, the answer is to build more primary schools. Most countries in Europe would do anything for this problem: with the populations ageing rapidly, European countries (including Britain) need all the young people they can get. If the NHS lacks capacity in London, expand that capacity. After all, immigrants pay tax. Indeed, the OECD calculates that in the UK they pay more into the pot than they take out.
Britons, especially those living outside London, will all be much the poorer if politicians fail to challenge the widespread belief that immigration is a burden rather than a boon.
Simon Tilford is deputy director of the Centre for European Reform.
The government wants to reduce net immigration to less than 100,000 a year. To this end it has tightened up the regime for student visas and for skilled immigration into the UK from outside the EU (non-EU countries account for two-thirds of the net immigration: the EU the remainder). There is little the government can do about EU immigrants, which explains the increasingly hysterical campaign to reduce their access to benefits. The government argues that the scale of immigration is prejudicing the employment prospects of lower-skilled British workers (over the last year more than half of new jobs went to immigrants, and youth unemployment is at a record high, ergo they are taking British jobs); placing a further burden on an already overwhelmed National Health Service (NHS) and school system; and leading to abuse of the country’s welfare system.
These claims are either wrong or misleading. Net immigration into the UK is not particularly high. It certainly rose following the opening up of the UK labour market to the new eastern European members of the EU in 2004. Over the 8 years to 2011 net immigration averaged 214,000 a year, before falling to 165,000 in 2012. In the context of a country as populous as the UK, this is a relatively modest inflow – adding about 0.3 per cent to population each year. And it is not especially high in a European context: over the last ten years, net immigration in Britain has been higher than France and Germany, but lower than in Italy or Spain. Talk of ‘mass immigration’ is well wide of the mark.
The UK is also very good at attracting skilled immigrants: almost 40 per cent of first generation immigrants have a university degree; the comparable figures for France and Germany are half that, and even lower for Spain and Italy. Indeed, the south-east of England is home to the biggest concentration of foreign professionals anywhere on earth. The reasons for this success range from the English language to the greater readiness of UK employers to recognise foreign qualifications. Many other first generation immigrants have vocational qualifications in skills like construction, which are in short supply in the UK. Even those in unskilled work are probably not displacing many local workers: these jobs tend to pay at or near the minimum wage – if employers hire immigrants, whose English is sometimes patchy and who often move on quickly, it must be partly because the locals are unwilling to take these jobs.
First generation immigrants tend to live in the most economically dynamic parts of the UK. This is inevitable – immigrants are drawn to where the work and opportunities are. But these areas are also wealthy and dynamic because of their openness. Contrary to popular myth, the areas of greatest immigration are not the ones with the greatest hostility to migration. London, for example, is easily the most tolerant region of the UK. The areas where there is most hostility to immigrants tend to be those where there are fewest immigrants, or where cultural and religious differences are pronounced, as in some northern English towns.
Openness largely explains London’s long renaissance and emergence as the only world city in Europe. It is perhaps the UK’s most precious economic asset. Huge amounts of tax revenue are redistributed from London to the rest of the country. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, one in every five pounds earned in London goes to subsidise other regions of the UK. Without this redistribution (and a smaller but still very large one from the rest of south-east England), the bleak economic prospects of swaths of Britain would be even bleaker. Of course London should be supporting the rest of the UK; it is easily the wealthiest region of the country. But the British government needs to resist popular pressures for controls which would erode London’s ability to generate that wealth.
British politicians need to think about what policies are needed to help London and its environs exploit its unique position. First, they should reverse the cap on student visas. This ill-thought out step has already damaged British universities – one of the country’s most successful export-industries – by making it harder for people to study in the UK. The number of foreign students in Britain is a much envied source of soft power (many either stay or retain long-term links with the country) and export earnings. While other European countries urgently try and attract more foreign students, Britain fashions ways of deterring them.
Second, the government should lift or scrap the caps placed on non-EU skilled immigrants. Given the increasingly fierce global competition for such workers, it is self-defeating to limit the number allowed into the country.
Third, the government should stop stigmatising EU immigrants. There is no evidence of benefit tourism or health tourism. If anything, the reverse is the case; EU immigrants in the UK are on average much younger that UK ones living elsewhere in the EU, and more likely to be in work than the native population. If there is a country in the EU with legitimate cause to resent health tourism, it is Spain, which must cope with large numbers of elderly Britons.
Fourth, it needs to open the way for more construction. The crippling cost of property is now a serious threat to the prosperity of London and the south of England generally; unless action is taken firms will find it increasingly hard to entice people to work there. It will, in turn, be impossible to build these houses unless contractors can rely on imported labour. Britain has an acute shortage of skilled construction workers and there is little indication that the unemployed elsewhere in the country have any desire to do this kind of work in London. There is a reason why London’s building sites are full of Poles rather than Liverpudlians.
How should the government address the rising anti-immigrant feeling that threatens the UK’s economic vibrancy and even its membership of the EU? It can do little about ignorance, other than to stop legitimising it by playing up to it. Instead of scape-goating the migrants that Britain needs, the government should concentrate on addressing the underlying cause of the popular frustration: an acute shortage of affordable housing, even in many economically depressed parts of the country; a lack of vocational training for those that do not go to university, and over-burdened public services. If there is a shortage of primary school places in London, the answer is to build more primary schools. Most countries in Europe would do anything for this problem: with the populations ageing rapidly, European countries (including Britain) need all the young people they can get. If the NHS lacks capacity in London, expand that capacity. After all, immigrants pay tax. Indeed, the OECD calculates that in the UK they pay more into the pot than they take out.
Britons, especially those living outside London, will all be much the poorer if politicians fail to challenge the widespread belief that immigration is a burden rather than a boon.
Simon Tilford is deputy director of the Centre for European Reform.
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