South & Southeast Asia

In 1960, South Korea's per capita GDP was roughly equivalent to Ghana's. Singapore was a malarial port city with no natural resources, mass unemployment, and ethnic tensions that periodically erupted into riots. India's economy grew so slowly that economists gave it a name: roughly 3.5 percent a year, barely ahead of population growth. The old label, "Hindu rate of growth," pinned the blame on culture; the real culprits were licensing regimes and policy choices. Indonesia was lurching from revolution to authoritarianism. The Philippines, once the wealthiest nation in Southeast Asia, was sliding into the kleptocratic embrace of Ferdinand Marcos.

Forty years later, South Korea manufactured semiconductors and automobiles that competed with Japan's. Singapore had a higher per capita income than its former colonial ruler, Britain. India's software engineers staffed back offices from Bangalore to Hyderabad. Thailand exported more rice than any country on earth while simultaneously building an industrial economy. Vietnam, unified under communist rule after decades of war, was quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

The transformation was not uniform, not painless, and not complete. But the speed and scale of change across South and Southeast Asia in the second half of the twentieth century remains one of the most consequential economic stories in human history.