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The Bad Side?

Democracy Working

After all the 'hype' about the resilience of the emerging economies, The Economist seem to have featured some of our South East Asian countries is rather bad light in one of the recent issues. While talking about Philippines' recent elections, they hinted at the economy's untapped potential and the lack of political will to do something about it. And then they presented a skeptical tone towards the current Thailand government's ability to garner the support of the country.

Finally, the drama in Malaysia drew some criticism and sarcasm once again. In many sense, these articles have a 'When will they grow up?' attitude, suggesting that the events in each of the countries are all too familiar. Indeed, in some cases it is difficult to be hopeful that things would change. When it comes to politics, the region is still immature in the conduct of democracy and economic development may have increased but the fruits of prosperity not as well distributed as one would like.

Catching up on economic growth is an extremely important step towards altering the politics although it is not always a guarantee that this would occur. Yet we should not think of any particular political system as an ultimate destination. Our experience with evolution is that several models of existence would sustain; the changing circumstance will continue to push these models and systems to evolve.