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  • Title of document: Paradigm Trap: The development establisment’s embrace of Myanmar and how to break loose

    Authors: Walden Bello

    Journal’s name if any:

    Ministry/Government Agency/Organisation: TNI

    Year of publication: 2018

    Geographic focus: Myanmar

    Main issues / topics addressed (for example: Introduction: Paradigm Trap; The Countryside: From Coercion to the Market; Extraction as Industrial Policy; Crony Capital: A Necessary Evil?…)

    School of agroecology (if any):

    Web address to original document (if any):

    Summary:

    Before elucidating this alternative paradigm, the report discusses Myanmar’s economic past and where it’s headed under the current paradigm.  Starting with land and agriculture, it explains how the repressive extraction of the agricultural surplus coupled with massive land-grabbing produced a crisis-ridden and stagnant agriculture during the military regime.

    The paper then moves to a discussion of industrial policy, where it probes how and why the military regime’s experiments with industrialization failed, after which it lays out a critique of the foreign investment-led and export-oriented industrialization process promoted by the Japanese government, subjecting to close scrutiny the key pillars of this strategy: economic corridors to promote regional connectivity, special economic zones (SEZ’s), and the “fragmentation” of the process of production that is supposed to benefit Myanmar.