The Land Rush in Myanmar

After decades of military rule, Myanmar at last has a democratically elected government. Longtime opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party took charge in March, with her ally Htin Kyaw becoming president and the Nobel laureate herself serving as foreign affairs minister. In response, the U.S. last month announced a partial rollback of economic sanctions first imposed in 1990 in an attempt to get the country’s generals and their cronies to relax their hold on power. The new policy will make it easier for American companies to do business in Myanmar. However, it doesn’t go far enough for Khin Shwe, the founder of Zaykabar, a construction company that’s on a U.S. blacklist of Myanmar businesses and individuals. Now that the country has freely elected leaders, he says, “they should lift sanctions.”

For Myanmar, a lot rides on whether and when the U.S. further relaxes trade and investment restrictions, which include travel bans and asset freezes targeting companies and individuals associated with the old regime. Two-thirds of its 53 million people live in the countryside, many without electricity. Annual per-capita gross domestic product is $1,200. Myanmar “is one of the few remaining largely untapped markets in the world,” wrote analysts Ong Kian Lin and Kasamapon Hamnilrat of Malaysia’s RHB Research Institute in a May 31 report.