STEPP was active in Myanmar ( former Burma) some thirty years ago. Therefore, we cannot help to always compare the new we see in the country , with what has been the situation before. One thing is rather obvious wherever we look: there has been a visible change, despite the years of isolation the country had to endure. There are now traffic jams on formerly deserted city roads, hotel rooms as rare and expensive as precious stones, more chinese and thai restaurants than buddhist pagodas, and beach resorts that make you think you have landed in a hollywood movie. Not only, whatever products the country could not obtain from the West, it was replaced with imports from the ASEAN neighbors.
It seems a fruitless discussion today, to try to answer the question , ” how effective or ineffective Western sanctions have been in influencing myanmar’s way – backward or forward.” The more pressing question instead is another one, namely how to best promote euro-myanmar business to business contacts and attract European investors to the country. But careful: The gradual lifting of the sanctions is certainly a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a conducive business environment. The country itself is called up to create a friendly, economically viable and stable investment environment, for avoiding opinions like the one we read in a local newspaper on the occasion of the Myanmar Global Investment Forum held on 12-13 September, and which read as follows: “Sanctions kept some countries from investing but… the high cost of doing business and the country formerly unstable political environment, previously made it an unattractive alternative to investors”. Today for different reasons costs are also very high, but the ongoing reform process makes the general environment more appealing.
Leave a Reply