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.
