Crazy Rich Asia, Crazy Poor Asia

Haneda Airport, Japan.  Source:  05-haneda-airport-tokyo-BUSYPORTS0519 a8f95cd98f24410795d470818f08e893.jpg (1200×750) (travelandleisure.com)

SO/ Hotel, an award-winning luxury boutique hotel in Central Bangkok, offers a buffet of up to 50 different cheeses every first Friday of the month. April and May vouchers were sold out. 

Suppathong, our favorite Grab driver, complained of his aching knees as he and his girlfriend scaled the 85-story Baiyoke Tower to meander, shop, and hie off to the all-day buffet on the top floor.   Stuffed and satiated, he beamed at how the Grab business was doing well as tourists continued to pour into Thailand. 

Then there's Singapore. The rental property market has gone crazy. According to Bloomberg Intelligence, rental prices soared 20.8% from January to September 2022.   Landlords are exhilarated, tenants are still shell-shocked, many scrounging for alternatives. So the government saw it fit to introduce cooling measures. 

Singapore's GDP growth is projected at 2.1% in 2023 and 2.7% in 2024. These are modest performance indicators compared to its other neighbors like Indonesia (5.3%), the Philippines (6-7%), and Malaysia (4.5%). Yet overall, the Singapore economy remains resilient and robust, with manufacturing, finance, insurance, and professional services as the leading growth sectors. The World Bank's Doing Business Report 2023 ranked Singapore number 2 for ease of doing business. And not to be missed is Changi Airport's number one position as the World's Best Airport in 2023, snatching the coveted title from Qatar's Hamad International Airport.  

All over the region, economies are headed toward boom times. Leading the pack is Vietnam, now touted as the darling of Southeast Asia, according to the World Bank.  Vietnam's economic growth is 6.3%, projected to rise to 6.5% in 2024 as domestic inflation challenges subside and main export markets in the US, China, and the Eurozone recover.

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Vietnam earned more than US$48 billion in export revenues. Health and education outcomes improved with rising living standards. Poverty declined from 14% in 2010 to 3.8% in 2020, an astounding accomplishment in a country whose poverty rate was 58% in 1993. Despite COVID-19, Vietnam's poverty reduction efforts were not set back, according to a joint report of the World Bank and Australia Aid. A 2021 report by the Brookings Institution hailed Vietnam as a development success story and a public health model. However, its vibrant economy will still have to reckon with the ethnic minorities who lack access to health, education, and social welfare services. 

Land or leave from any airport in Asia, and you might be convinced that the pandemic was either a fluke, a myth, or a long-ago lousy dream. No one talks about COVID-19 anymore, at least not in the urgency that it used to be discussed when it first made its stealthy appearance three years ago. Or exasperatedly, as the pandemic wore out everyone's patience with endless variations of quarantines and lockdowns. The pandemic talk among policy-and decision- makers was one of forward planning to ensure that societies will rebound constructively. For others, the pandemic is cocktail-and-dinner talk, another opportunity to reminisce those years when humanity was forced back into the cave. 

The IMF corroborated the upbeat view in Asia, pinpointing China and India as the primary drivers of global growth in the recovery period. These economic powerhouses are expected to contribute "around half of global growth this year, with the rest of Asia and the Pacific contributing an additional fifth." The tiny nations of Laos and Timor Leste are expected to grow at 4.5% and 3%, respectively. 

According to CNN, China's "Golden Week" for travel, or the May Day period that spanned five days from 29 April to 3 May, surged past pre-pandemic levels. Travelers made 274 million trips within the mainland, and 120 million train trips were recorded by the national railway operator. 

Conversely, India is projected to grow at an ambitious 9.8%, a "roaring recovery," proclaimed the Financial Times in mid-2022. India's tourism industry will be ramped up through investments in the rail sector and improvements in airports and landing areas. India launched its "Visit India 2023" campaign to coincide with India's G20 presidency.   

But dark clouds hover in the region.   Inflation is a real damper. Already troubled by political unrest, Myanmar suffers from an inflation rate of 16.2%, reports Statista.com. The war in Ukraine continues to affect commodity prices, disrupt supply chains, and intensify geopolitical tensions that negatively impact global trade. 

Woochong Um, managing director of the Asian Development Bank, noted that "pandemic scarring remains a big concern, and there are looming threats of food security and energy price shocks."

If the Book of Matthew in the Christian Bible is to be believed, "the poor you will always have with you." Is this a condition of humanity, the permanent scourge of poverty? 

In Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia and the world's fourth most populous nation, an estimated 27.55 million Indonesians live below the poverty line or roughly 10.1% of its population, according to the latest World Bank report. Myanmar's economic development lags way behind its neighbors, its inflation rate galloping at 10.5%. At a poverty rate of 35%, one in three people in Myanmar lives in poverty. Its dismal economic performance resulted from prolonged political conflict with no resolution in sight.  

Even as I write this, the air in Bangkok is stultifying. It's been a cough-choke-hack-croack month as air quality in northern Thailand deteriorated to crisis levels. The culprit? Transboundary haze in Thailand and its northern neighbors due to seasonal burning of agricultural waste as reported by the Nikkei Asia Review. Symptomatic of rural poverty that afflicts farmers who cannot afford machinery to clear the debris and expand crop areas for cultivation, farmers resort to burning. The cover story of Nikkei Asia Review in mid-April 2023 was entitled "Asia's Next' Airpocalypse.' Tourism was affected negatively, as proposed visits to the exotic northern cities of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai were shelved. 

Dark clouds notwithstanding, Asia will rise to these challenges. We live in a continent on the forward march. Our countries are geared up for the future.  

The recently-concluded 56^th annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Incheon was all about Asia and the three R's:  recovery, reconnect, and reform. Four thousand five hundred participants tackled climate change and financing, which topped the two-day agenda.    ADB is positioning itself as a "climate bank."

At the end of May, the Nikkei Forum will host a dialogue entitled "The Future of Asia: Leveraging Asia's Power to Confront Global Challenges." The conference's theme is simple and straightforward:  how can the region "unlock and mobilize its potential to solve common issues in a multipolar world?" 

In late June, the China conference opens in Hong Kong. Its theme, "Towards a Smart and Connected Future," echoes the continent's preoccupation: the pandemic is firmly in the past, and the future has never looked better in Asia!