In its attempts to produce a transparent national budget, the parliament is discovering that inadequate official accounting and the confusion of multiple exchange rates make this a difficult, if not impossible, task.”
Another business specialist who has just visited Burma to assess the economic situation said, “Burma lacks even the most basic tools for gathering economic and social data, which makes reform harder.”
“There is a severe shortage of intellectual horsepower in the government,” business book author Phillip Delves Broughton wrote in a report for the Royal Institute of International Affairs think tank in London.
“When officials from the World Bank visited recently and started talking about inflation targeting and controlling M2, the generals nodded but conceded privately afterwards that they hadn’t a clue what was being said.”
“Even the most basic credit system would have a dramatic effect on Burmese growth,” he wrote.
Delves Broughton wrote “The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters about the Business of Life” based on his time at Harvard Business School. His mother was born in Burma but fled the military takeover.
An issue facing the reformers if they prevail, says Delves Broughton, is deciding which national model to copy from among the nine other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ranging from the messy democracies of Indonesia and the Philippines to the strict orderliness of Singapore.
Given the Burmese weariness and wariness of military uniforms, they surely wouldn’t want to follow their neighbor Thailand’s democracy model, peppered with 18 military coups and 17 constitutions since 1932.
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