Anti-Poverty Policy in Southeast Asia

This chapter provides a focused comparative account of anti-poverty policy in nine Southeast Asian countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. It offers an overview of the evolution of anti-poverty discourses before and after the ‘social turn’ and summarizes trends in poverty outcomes, fiscal spending, and social rights, discussing how these innovations have reshaped the Southeast Asian welfare landscape. It concludes with an analysis of contemporary challenges for anti-poverty policies in the region, such as the impact of labour market informality, changing geopolitics, climate change, and population ageing. Theoretically the chapter argues that the existing diversity within Southeast Asian anti-poverty responses, combined with varying fiscal capacities and risk factors, will continue to drive a ‘diffluent’ trajectory in anti-poverty outcomes, creating a more extensive divergence between the top and bottom performers in the region, despite a similar direction of post-productivist travel.