ASTRONOMICAL downtown rents, power cuts, traffic that gets worse by the week: these are Yangon’s growing pains. But they pale in comparison with its growing pleasures: cranes everywhere, a steady stream of new businesses and, most important, optimistic citizens. Signs of progress abound, some flashy—swish new restaurants and hotels—and others mundane—co-ordinated bus routes that have ended the lunatic system whereby the packed vehicles of competing firms raced from stop to stop to snaffle the waiting customers.
Outside the city, however, the lustre fades quickly. Booming Yangon uses perhaps half of Myanmar’s electricity and accounts for as much as a quarter of its economic output, but most of the country’s population is still rural. They fish or farm, often using primitive methods, a fact that becomes glaringly apparent as soon as you leave Yangon. The military regimes that ruled Myanmar for 50 years left it isolated and impoverished.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who opposed the generals for decades before assuming the country’s leadership last March, entered office with the wind at her back. The military junta had begun liberalising the economy before it handed...Continue reading
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