ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Southeast Asia's 'new' poor, leading the discussion away from the 'old' poor whose condition, across much of the region, has been largely addressed. The new poor and the old poor need to be understood less in terms of their position above, below or close to some poverty line, but rather in terms of the relations and processes that have served to mark them out as vulnerable, precarious or dispossessed. The fact of Asians poverty or non-poverty is of less significance than the articulations of society and economy. One of the background reasons for the extension of precarity in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia is because of the way in which the growth in employment in the formal sector is so tightly bound up with migration. The expansion of oil palm and rubber across hundreds of thousands of hectares of the region has boosted exports, raised foreign exchange, contributed to economic expansion, and created employment.
