Asian investors have doubts about Myanmar’s military regime

WHEN TANKS rumbled into Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, on February 1st, the man who sent them there, Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, tried to offer the public reassurance. Though the civilian leadership had been supplanted by men in fatigues, the coup, he suggested, would be good for the economy.

It was not an absurd claim: the previous military-backed government, in power from 2011 to 2016, was considered more solicitous and efficient by many businessmen than the democratically elected one that followed it. And although previous stints of military rule had seen America and other Western countries impose sanctions, many Asian investors had ignored them and piled into what had seemed a promising market. Some 90% of the total stock of foreign investment in Myanmar comes from other Asian countries. If businesses around the region could be persuaded to keep funnelling money to the country, the general’s boosterism could conceivably prove correct. But the initial evidence suggests they are not quite as gung-ho as they used to be.