Tackling poverty and deprivation in Southeast Asia: policies, performance and challenges

Over the past decades, countries in Southeast Asia have seen remarkable economic growth that helped reduce poverty and raise living standards of their population. This has earned the region the distinction of being a development success story. Since the release of the World Bank's 1993 report - The East Asian Miracle - analysts and international development agencies used the terms 'newly industrializing countries' (NICs), 'Asian Tigers', 'high-performing Asian economies', and 'second generation of NICs' to explain the extraordinary record of major economies in the region. They also use the term 'tiger cub' to describe Vietnam's transition to a market economy and 'poster children' to refer to the relatively slow-performing economies like Cambodia and Lao, PDR (Rigg, 2020).