ABSTRACT
There is still a tendency, as noted in the previous chapter, to view Southeast Asia as a rural world and this rural world as, fundamentally, an agricultural one. The chapter challenged such a perception by highlighting the deepening hybridity of rural people’s lives and livelihoods as individuals and households embrace non-farm as well as farm-based activities. At a wider level, the structure of the region’s economies has undergone equally deep change, reflected in the shifting sectoral share of output away from agriculture (see Table 1.1). A highly striking – and contentious, from the point of view of human development – aspect of this change has been the emergence of a dynamic manufacturing sector geared to export. In the eyes of many commentators, the most visible signs of economic success – at least prior to the Asian crisis – are to be found in the factories of the region, and are reflected in statistics detailing the growth of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the parallel expansion of manufacturing exports (Table 6.1 and Figures 6.1 and 6.2). In its World development report 1995: workers in an integrating world, the World Bank argued that to successfully tackle the ‘problems of low incomes, poor working conditions, and insecurity’ and to do so in ‘ways that reduce poverty and regional equality’, governments must ‘pursue market-based growth paths’, and ‘take advantage of new opportunities at the international level, by opening up to trade and attracting capital’ (World Bank 1995: 2). To critics of the World Bank’s preoccupation with this marketbased, globally structured and internationalized recipe for successful industrialization, the risks and faults have been all too evident at the human level in the factories of the developing world – and, at a wider level, were starkly illustrated in the Asian crisis of mid-1997.
