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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

Myanmar talk kicks off crash course lecture series

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Professor David Dapice led a discussion on Myanmar's economic development in Goddard Chapel on Oct. 6.

David Dapice, associate professor of economics and chief economist at the Harvard Kennedy School's Myanmar Program, presented a lecture on economic development in Myanmar last night at 6:00 p.m. in Goddard Hall. The lecture, titled "Against the Odds: Economic Development in Myanmar," was part of the International Relations Program's Director's Leadership Council (DLC)crash course series.

Senior Yufei Du, one of the DLC board members, opened the discussion, explaining how the crash course series aims to educate students on hot topics around the world. He then introduced Dapice, who has studied Myanmar's economic development since his first visit to the nation in 1973 and has advised Myanmar's government in various capacities in the last few decades.

Dapice began the lecture by discussing Myanmar's history with colonialism, explaining how Britain sought to acquire Myanmar -- then called Burma -- as a buffer state between India and French colonial holdings in Southeast Asia. The British often used ethnic minority populations, which make up approximately one third of Myanmar's population, to enforce British rule upon the Burmese people, according to Dapice. 

While installing a colonial government where a monarchy used to exist,Britian also incorporated Burma into Indian colonial boundaries and brought Indian civil servants into the government, which angered the local population.

"They changed a set of rules based on a monarch to a more commercial set of rules," Dapice said. "The Burmese pretty much got the short end of the stick."

After gaining independence from Britain after World War II, successive Burmese governments worked to remove British and Indian influences from the country's political and economic systems, but this left little infrastructure on which to build a stable system, Dapice explained. Severe postwar government weakness also prevented economic development even before the military seized power.

During one of his visits, Dapice noted that "there were no places that sold things, except for at night on blankets," referring to goods brought in from underground economic markets.

The military government imbued Myanmar with a "neo-feudal" mentality based on obligations to the government, which continues to hinder economic development, according to Dapice.

"Every person in Myanmar owed [the military government] a fealty -- if they wanted rice, they should give them rice; if they wanted labor, they should give them labor," Dapice said.

Dapice then showed a series of graphs, which demonstrated that Myanmar has among the lowest gross domestic products (GDP) per capita in Asia, with a gross national income per capita currently lower than that of North Korea. Electricity consumption in kilowatt hours lags behind that of Bangladesh and Indonesia, and its electricity production has remained fairly constant since 1995.

In 2012, in a World Bank 600-point ranking of six dimensions of effective governance, Myanmar scored less than 50 points -- less than North Korea.Dapice said some of this can be attributed to a "resource curse," wherein developing countries with high levels of natural resources see greatly increased conflict over control of those resources.

On his visits to Myanmar, Dapice said he observed severe shortages of credit and poor agricultural conditions, which contrasted with the production figures the government cited.

"The farmers had been decapitalized by the intense demands for cheap rice and labor," Dapice said, adding that the effects of Cyclone Nargis in 2008 also hindered economic development.

Dapice explained how the military's predominance in Myanmar's government permeates everyday life in the country.

"If you drive through a lot of these states, you see miles upon miles of military outposts," he said.

He added that the government often takes land from farmers and then makes them pay rent to use that land.

"You see how necessary it is to step back from this neo-feudal situation," Dapice said.

Dapice used Myanmar's jade industry as an example of how a major industry largely conducts itself outside the government's purview. When he traveled to Myanmar to evaluate the size of the jade industry, he found that it was much larger than the government had reported because many traders of jade do not report their activity to the government in order to avoid taxation.

Dapice concluded the discussion by inviting the audience to discuss possible outcomes for Myanmar's political future. He added Myanmar is currently at a critical juncture, where it needs to make a choice about its next political steps.