Between 1880 and 1939 Burma, Malaya, and Thailand received inflows of migrants from India and China comparable in size to European immigration in the New World. This article examines the forces that lay behind migration to Southeast Asia and asks if experience there bears out Lewis's unlimited labor supply hypothesis. We find that it does and, furthermore, that immigration created a highly integrated labor market stretching from South India to Southeastern China. Emigration from India and China and elastic labor supply are identified as important components of Asian globalization before the Second World War.
This article analyses Southeast Asian finance over more than a century in light of three issues: the realisation of finance‐leading development; indigenous entrepreneurship; and effective credit provision in rural areas. Colonial currency board systems and non‐interventionist government characterised finance in pre‐World War II Southeast Asia. There was decisive change after independence to a variety of state‐directed, or indeed socialist, attempts to overcome unfavourable pre‐war development legacies. Despite these departures, the article finds that throughout Southeast Asian history, finance rarely, if ever, led development. Today, indigenous entrepreneurship, explored for Malaysia, is generally either bolstered by political patrons or even entirely substituted for by state finance. More positively, market‐aware state initiatives in microfinance may offer a realistic institutional alternative to rural Southeast Asia's historic reliance on informal finance.
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