This week, while UN technocrats try to re-crunch the numbers on how a misgoverned nation like Zimbabwe can possibly halve its poverty rate by 2015, delegates from Vietnam and Thailand will toast a fait accompli. The percentage of Vietnamese living on less than $1.25 a day has not only already fallen by half since the 1990s – mission accomplished – it’s fallen by two thirds. Childhood mortality in Thailand is a quarter of what it was at the start of the period.
World Bank spokesman Phil Hay says you can feel that change in the way the world’s economic tides are pulling, as Vietnamese cities insource factory jobs from China.
“The old idea that Southeast Asia is outside of the global economy is thinking that is at least 15 years old,” he says.
