Southeast Asia Must Embrace Reforms for 'China Plus One' to Succeed The "China plus one" strategy, once hailed as a game changer for Southeast Asia, is starting to look like just another iteration of the region's long standing problems.
Governments in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia touted foreign investment as the key to breaking out of the middle income trap, but they forgot an essential ingredient: domestic reform.
In Thailand, a record number of applications for electric vehicles and electronics projects have failed to translate into meaningful wage growth or industrial progress.