Introduction

Compartmentalization has been all too prevalent in analysing the economic problems facing that complex society called, today, Myanmar. An unfortunate academic predisposition exists towards maintenance of the purity of disciplines which often leads observers to separate social sectors into clear and distinct categories. This Cartesian approach may be academically appropriate, but it neglects reality and tends to obfuscate the possibilities of policy formation that could lead to practical results. The development of watertight disciplinary departments that feed within exceedingly limited and abstracted perspectives seems especially rife in the field of economics, where specialists create models that, although internally consistent, may ignore other critical elements that relate to social reality beyond the periphery of the discipline. Complexities in the social sciences that transcend disciplinary categories and are not quantifiable are often attributed to the amorphous arena of “culture”, an ill-defined but exceedingly useful, intellectual quagmire usually denigrated by economists and others as beyond the disciplinary pale. Are they the academic equivalent of Joseph Goebbels who, if memory serves, said that when he heard the word “culture”, he reached for his gun?

The question of disciplinary segregation has also been prevalent in other states and in economic assistance organizations; their experience may offer some lessons for Myanmar and for its future and necessary economic rehabilitation. For example, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank criticized South Korea (among other states) during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 for the deleterious link between the state, the supposedly autonomous financial institutions, and big private businesses (chaebol or zaibatsu) that resulted in non-viable lending, favouritism, and corruption among all three groups, they decried it; they were quite accurate that such collusion was rampant and deleterious. The multilateral institutions thus called for reforms which the Korean government agreed to implement. Although the diagnosis may have been correct and the medicine prescribed may have been appropriate, all groups naively believed (or said they believed) that the disease could be isolated by an administrative tourniquet — that there were watertight compartments separating economic reform from other societal aspects.