Challenging Southeast Asian Development

Over the course of the last half century, the growth economies of Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – have transformed themselves into middle income countries. This book looks at how the very success of these economies has bred new challenges, novel problems, and fresh tensions, including the fact that particular individuals, sectors and regions have been marginalised by these processes.

Contributing to discussions of policy implications, the book melds endogenous and exogenous approaches to thinking about development paths, re-frames Asia’s model(s) of growth and draws out the social, environmental, political and economic side-effects that have arisen from growth. An interesting analysis of the problems that come alongside development’s achievements, this book is an important contribution to Southeast Asian Studies, Development Studies and Environmental Studies.

Jonathan Rigg is Professor of Geography at the National University of Singapore. His previous publications include An everyday geography of the Global South (2007), Living with transition in Laos: market integration in Southeast Asia (2005), Southeast Asia: the human landscape of modernization and development (2003) and Asian cities, migrant labor and contested spaces (co-edited, 2011), all published by Routledge.