Economic development Economic devel

Economic development
Economic development has played a strong role in the region’s politics but has not quite had expected
Consequences. Poor and stagnant economies produced very little political change, whereas vast economic transformations over several decades created some pressures for political reform, but not the corresponding democratic politics that one might expect.
With the exception of Singapore, all countries in the region were agrarian economies at the time of independence. Aside from very large majorities of peasants, they had small groups of educated people many of whom had served colonial bureaucracies. Some areas were largely integrated to world markets, especially where colonial rulers had exploited cash crops – oil palm, rubber, coffee, spices – for export to Europe. Some rice basket areas of the region also became important rice exporters. Thailand and Burma, for instance, were top rice producers in the 1940s and 1950s. Significant plantation and cash crop economies developed in parts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia