The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Peter Zeihan || Demographics Part 8: Optimism for Southeast Asia

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

The demographic outlook of Southeast Asia is one of the best in the world. It's one thing to have a single country with solid demographics but put all of Southeast Asia together, and the region's strength amplifies. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/demographics-part-8-optimism-for-southeast-asia

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Ohio, California. And as promised, today I wanted to talk about demographics in Southeast Asia, a portion of the world that I think is going to do very well in the decades to come. Now, if you remember correctly, when I did the first issue of this series, we talked about how different population structures make for different economic structures. So if you have a lot of people aged 20 to 40, you tend to have a really strong workforce and a good consumption base, because those things, the people who are building their homes and raising kids.

If you have a lot of people aged roughly 45 to 65, you tend to have a very productive worker base because these are people with decades of experience behind them. And if they don't have a lot of kids, all the income of the society, all the taxes generated can be focused on infrastructure and on-the-job training, making for a very, very, very skilled workforce.

One of the reasons I'm so bullish on Southeast Asia is because it's got both of these imbalance. So on the bottom, you've got countries like Myanmar and Cambodia and Laos who are very child-heavy, and they can be a workforce not just now, but decades into the future. So if the money is made available, if the regional demand for their services is there, you have a very large, low-skilled workforce. In the middle, you've got a lot of countries like, say, Vietnam, particularly, but also Indonesia, and to a lesser degree Malaysia, who are a little bit older.

don't have a lot of kids relative to their overall population structure, but a lot of people who are age 20 to 45, and these are countries that, as a rule, are kind of having their day right now. The more problems that the Chinese have with keeping investment, the more diversified folks are looking to make their supply chains globally, the better these countries look. Vietnam in particular is getting in on this in a very big way with education, and about 40% of their college graduates are in STEM.

You know, that's like four times the global average. And then at the top, you've got a number of societies like Singapore and Thailand, which are aging pretty quickly. They had their day as a low-cost wage destination a couple decades ago. And now you've got a lot of people who are in their 40s, 50s, and even early 60s. They're aging quickly. It looks a lot more like Northeast Asia than the rest of their neighborhood. But the accrued technical skills in these populations is huge,

especially in a place like Singapore. And Thailand punches well above its weight as a midway. destination. And having these all in the same neighborhood really helps with manufacturing. So one of the things you want to do for the more complex manufacturing products, whether it's cell phones or electronics or computing, is not everything requires the same skill set. The person who does the injection molding is not the person who does the wiring harness is not the person who does the chips is not the person who does the assembly. Each of these has a

different wage structure and in that sort of environment variety is everything and proximity is everything. And this is the world's most differentiated workforce all within the same region. So you throw a little bit of Japanese or American technology in there, maybe some Chinese assembly on the back end, and this area is set to boom. Best part yet, because this region is made up of mountains and peninsulas and islands and jungles, they've never had a history of going to war with one another because they can't get any one another. So they don't have the history of animosity that we see in, say, Europe or,

Northeast Asia. Add it all up and this is the part of the world that I expect to grow the most rapidly in the 30 years to come with demography at its heart. All right, that's it for now. See you next time.