Janet Pau

The View | Asia’s rising economies are more than ‘China Plus One’ destinations

The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Thailand have benefited from global supply chain diversification and are poised to capitalise on their large labour pool and potential consumer market to reach the next level of development

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Daily-wage construction workers wait for their transport in Mumbai on February 1. The Philippines, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Vietnam need to prioritise initiatives to create green jobs and digital jobs to cater to the needs of their increasingly educated and demanding young workforces. Photo: AFP

Janet Pau

Published: 4:30pm, 21 Feb 2024

Asia’s four little dragons have been emblematic of the region’s remarkable economic growth over the last half a century. In this Year of the Dragon, several other emerging regional economies are poised to rise as the new dragons.

The original dragon economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea achieved rapid growth from the 1960s to the early 1990s largely through export-oriented models, leveraging their competitive advantages in manufacturing and trade, and pursuing a high degree of openness.

China followed in their footsteps when it implemented economic reforms and integrated itself into global supply chains.

Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Thailand, which have large populations but are currently less developed than China in terms of GDP per capita, are set to take flight. They achieved credible average GDP growth in the years before the Covid-19 outbreak and rebounded strongly following the pandemic. Moreover, in recent years, they have garnered interest as “China Plus One” destinations for global supply chains and operations.

The five economies have in common large labour forces and potential consumer markets, offering opportunities for both domestic and international expansion. In the earlier stages of their development in the 1980s and 1990s, to varying degrees, they followed the Washington Consensus, a set of market-oriented reforms recommendations by Washington-based institutions such as the World Bank, including privatisation, financial deregulation and trade liberalisation.