Not-purchasing power: boycotts in Myanmar

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Most people have at least a little DNA from Neanderthals thanks to at least a little interbreeding in humans earliest days. That DNA holds some good news and some bad news in terms of modern humans response to the coronavirus. And yesterday was census day in Britain. Actually, I have to go put mine in the post. We take a historical look at how past censuses reveal changing societal norms and preoccupations and ask what the questions this time say about Britain in 2021. But first, Protests against the military coup in Myanmar continued this weekend. In the city of Monyi Wa. Yesterday, security forces set off stun grenades as demonstrators hurled missiles and lit fireworks. On Saturday, people fled gunfire in the capital, Nay Piedaw.

Yes, yes.

It's estimated that nearly two hundred and fifty protesters have been killed since the coup at the beginning of February. Some targeted by snipers, others killed at random. The violence has prompted people to find other means of protest.

The protesters are not giving up. They are continuing to demonstrate on the streets despite the ever growing brutality of the army. At the same time though, they are also protesting in a subtler way.

Charlie McCann is the Economist's Southeast Asia correspondent.

If you go to supermarkets, corner stores across the country, it will be very difficult to buy a can of Myanmar Beer. That's because Myanmar Beer is produced by a company partly owned by the army. So Burmese all over the country are boycotting Myanmar Beer and other products also produced by the army. So for instance, the most popular brand of cigarette, SIM cards made by a telecommunications company also owned by the army. And these boycotts, along with a general strike, are designed to disrupt the business of the government and ideally to cut off the juntas money supply in the hope that that will make them retreat.

So just how important are those sources of income to the army?

It's hard to know for certain because the army's finances are notoriously opaque. So to put this in context, the army wields enormous economic clout. So in addition to the defence budget, which amounted to $3 billion last year, it also drives income from these two massive conglomerates, Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited, also known as MEL and Myanmar Economic Corporation, or MEC. And their tentacles have a firm grip on many sectors in Myanmar. Among them banking, retail, mining, construction. So like I said, it's hard to know exactly how much these companies contribute to the army's finances. MEL and MEC have never published annual reports. But one researcher studying them thinks that the revenue that the army generates from off budget economic activity is somewhere within the range of 400 million to $1.3 billion.

So in that sense, the protesters won't know just how much damage they're doing by boycotting these products.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. That doesn't mean they're not going to try though. We know anecdotally that these army products aren't being sold in supermarkets and in corner shops. Even if they were, they wouldn't be bought. And it goes beyond that. So lots of investors have begun cutting ties with MEL after being named and shamed by activists. And taken together, the boycott, the flight of foreign investment, the strike which is paralyzing the country, that's doing a lot of damage to the economy. Since early February, the currency Myanmar, the chat has depreciated by about 10%. The price of basic goods is spiking in many parts of the country and the cost of fuel has even increased by 15%.

And so what's the government doing to make up the shortfall?

Well, it's trying to access its foreign reserves. So shortly after the coup, the central bank, which by this time was in the hands of the junta, attempted to bring home $1 billion that it holds at the Federal Reserve bank in New York. So American authorities intervened and blocked that transaction. A couple of weeks later, the government tried to sell 200 billion chat worth of five year bonds. 200 billion chats is about $140 million. It received just one bid for $1.2 million worth, and at a higher interest rate than normal. And so the IMF puts the government's reserves of foreign currency at $6.7 billion. That would be enough to buy it about five months of imports. A really important point because Myanmar imports almost all of its fuel and cooking oil and other basic goods. You know, another sign of the distress that it's in is that the central bank placed limits on withdrawals on March 1st. And on top of that, the government's going to have a really hard time drawing revenue in from the country. So last year, even before coup, the World bank was projecting a budget deficit of 8% this year. And if the failed bond auction is any guide, the budget deficit's only going to become harder to finance as well.

So it sounds as if the government itself, the army, clearly is running out of cash.

You'd think looking at their balance sheets, but this is the army we're talking about, and they have other ways that they can gin up income. The army has for decades been involved in the extraction and smuggling of jade, other gems, timber, oil and gas. And in addition to the profits it can make from these illicit activities, the junta can be sure that it will continue to get a minimum income from its state owned companies, particularly those that are involved in the oil, gas and mining sectors, which astonishingly account for a bigger share of government revenue than tax does. And given that the junta doesn't have any problem with shooting its own citizens, we can reasonably assume that it won't have any problems about mismanaging the economy by, for instance, redirecting the education budget to the defense budget or ordering the central bank to print money, inflation be damned.

Isn't there the danger though, that this subtle new way of protesting, as you put it, is just going to create deeper economic hardship?

Absolutely. And the protesters know this better than anyone else. The ones I've spoken to have said they understand that by going on strike, by refusing to buy army goods, they're helping to inflict damage on the economy. But that's a price they're willing to pay in order to get the army to reverse their coup. The trouble is, is that after decades of enriching themselves, the commander in chief and his cronies are in a much better position to withstand the economic turmoil of the months to come.

Charlie, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show notes. The Neanderthals were an early human like species thought to have died out about 40,000 years ago. In some places they coexisted with modern humans ancestors, which is to say that quite a few Neanderthal genes are present in modern humans too many of those genes seem to be related to the body's immune system, affecting the risk of developing diseases such as lupus, Crohn's and diabetes. And some of them affect how the human body fights COVID 19.

Researchers noticed that there were two areas of the genome that seemed to be related to disease severity in COVID 19, but they actually come from the Neanderthal genome.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

So these two groups of genes on the chromosomes, which are known as haplotypes, one is on chromosome 3 and this haplotype is bad news for people if they have it and they get COVID 19. The other, found on chromosome 12 is good news.

Okay, let's take these in turns. Tell me about the bad news one on chromosome 3.

So we know that if you have COVID 19 and you have one copy of this haplotype on chromosome 3, it doubles your chances of ending up in intensive care. We know that it interacts with the encoding of proteins that then interact with bits on cell surfaces which coronaviruses like to bind to. So it could be making it easier for SARS CoV2 to enter and hijack cells. But whether or not that specifically is true remains uncertain. It also seems to be involved in cytokine production, and cytokines are important for communicating within the immune system. That's helpful. But we know also that the cytokine storm, which is an overly aggressive response, can actually make a Covid case much, much worse and potentially kill you. So the fact that this haplotype on chromosome 3 has these interactions suggests that that's why it makes things worse. But exactly what's going on is not yet known.

And conversely, what about the good news haplotype?

So the good news haplotype unfortunately isn't as much good news. It's found on chromosome 12 and if you have just one copy of it, reduces your chances of ending up in intensive care by about 22%. We know that this haplotype is involved in the self destruct button inside cells when they are invaded. The the virus can hijack their machinery and begin replicating itself, basically turning the cell into a virus factory. The cell can stop that by destroying itself. And it appears that this haplotype on chromosome 12 is related to that. And therefore having it means that the cells are more likely to shut themselves down. We also know that this haplotype is involved in hampering the spread of some other key RNA viruses, SARS, CoV1 and hepatitis C and West Nile virus.

And how widespread are these different haplotypes? How many people have them? Where in the world are they?

So the chromosome 12 haplotype is found all over the world. There are some areas that have up to 35 to 40% of the population carrying at least one copy of that haplotype. In other areas, it's down much, much lower. So, for example, Africa was never visited by Neanderthals, to our knowledge. So people in African populations who have been there for their entire evolutionary history carry almost no Neanderthal genes. And so we see that chromosome 12 haplotype. It's almost absent there. As for the chromosome 3 haplotype, you've got this mix in Eastern Asia, where you have a lot of people carrying the chromosome 12 haplotype and very few people carrying the chromosome 3 haplotype. That creates a net benefit, a significant one, which makes things quite interesting for how people have faced the disease in Eastern Asia.

If there have been differing overall death tolls, for example, in different parts of the world, and different prevalences of these haplotypes around the world, can we start to unpick how much those haplotypes have had an effect in different parts of the world?

You can do that. It gets dicey, though, because trying to disentangle socioeconomics from genetics is like finding a needle in a haystack. It's really hard to get a clear signal. I'll give you an example. People of African American heritage in the us if they still carry predominantly African genes, should be dying from COVID 19 less often than people who are white Americans. And yet that's not what we see. That suggests that there's some serious inequality going on in terms of the health care that you can get and also the kinds of jobs that people are doing that are leading them to become exposed in the first place. In contrast to that in East Asia, eastern China, Japan, Vietnam, these populations have done very well comparatively against COVID 19. And up until now, most of the arguments that have been made are that the governments worked quickly, people were forced to wear masks. And while that is certainly true. You've also got the genetics at work here and that cannot be ignored. So it's entirely possible that in those regions where we've seen COVID 19 take less of a toll on life, genetics are very likely a factor, and we're starting to pay more attention to that and we should be doing so.

So in what way is this genetic information sort of proactively useful then?

So, for example, in Bangladesh, 60 plus percentage of the population has this harmful chromosome 3 haplotype. Bangladesh also has a long history of cholera. So there are some speculations that the reason the people of Bangladesh have this harmful haplotype is because while it's harmful against RNA viruses like SARS CoV2, it is beneficial against other diseases like the bacterial infection that causes cholera. So the better we understand the fact that different populations have faced different disease enemies in the past and that their immune systems have been shaped by that, we can start to look at emerging diseases and say, this is an RNA virus like West Nile and SARS CoV2. So we know that East Asia should handle it genetically pretty well. But we know that the people of Bangladesh, for example, are going to get hit hard because they happen to have this chromosome 3 haplotype. And that can start to help you as a world authority to figure out who needs the resources and who's going to be dying. I think we're still a ways off from that, but this is certainly the direction that we're heading.

Matt, thank you very much for joining us.

It's my pleasure, Jason.

Yesterday was census day in Britain. On a given day, every 10 years, households fill out a questionnaire about whose l there on that day. Once upon a time, it was a simple headcount. But over the course of 200 years, other queries have been added and sometimes removed. Questions that seem routine and uncontroversial now weren't always that way. And true to history, there are questions in this year's census that are causing a ruckus.

The big issue in this year's census is all about gender, reflecting the wider societal discussion around this topic. And it's not the only time that census questions have proved controversial.

Elliot Keim is our Britain correspondent.

Well, the census isn't just an indication of how many people are living in the country at any given time. It's also a window into what issues are important to a society.

So what do censuses of bygone eras tell us about what was important during those times?

In the early 19th century, there were sort of two panics about population one was that Britain was locked in a bitter war with the French. The government needed to understand how much potential manpower they might need in order to deal with that problem. But there was also this big intellectual concern that had been kick started by Thomas Malthus, who had warned that population growth would lead to starvation. And that alarmist view of the future spread through the elite and the officials at the time. So in 1801, they set out to map all of the people in the UK. What they did between 1801 and 1831 was they just asked the local clergy and people who would administer relief to the poor to count everybody in their parishes who worked in agriculture, for instance. And giving power out in that way also allowed them to monitor other things.

And what other things did the censuses ask about?

Well, in 1851, epidemics were raging in growing cities and it was under the influence of an epidemiologist called William Farr, who was pushing for sanity reforms, that public health questions started to be asked. And the question about health had evolved. They'd been sort of taken over by social Darwinists and eugenicists, who were very, very worried after the Boer War that the poor were having more children than the rich and there would be an imperial decline of the genetics of the British race. So they started to ask all sorts of other things, like fertility, for instance. So they asked how many children each person in the household had had and what illnesses each different type of person had.

Right. And what about more recent censuses? What do they tell us?

After the Second World War, there becomes a real focus on material expectations, such as between 1951 and 1991, the availability of inside and outside toilets, which is actually a question they kept on asking in Northern Ireland up until 2001. And that was because there was a post war competition between the two main parties in Britain who would be the best at rebuilding war ruined housing and building social housing instead. And then we get to 1981, when officials wanted to ask about ethnicity for the first time, but it was deemed too sensitive a subject. So was added a decade later in 1991. And then the Office for National Statistics realised they needed to start asking lots of other questions about identity in order to get that sort of whole picture of what was really going on in society and how diverse it was becoming. So in 2001, they added a question about religion. When 400,000 people identified as Jedi in 2011, that number had shrunk to 177,000, but was still the seventh largest identified religion. And there are worries that if this continues, it will lead to the undercounting of non religious people. And then in 2011, a question about national identity was included and now those identities have been supplemented by gender and sexual orientation. So it really is a story of social progress in lots of different ways.

And what are the issues around those questions in this year's census?

Well, this year, the Office for National Statistics decided to allow people to self identify their gender, which was celebrated by many people around the country. But a few campaign groups argued that that would skew data that lots of local authorities need in order to provide things like maternity services and school places. Thus it would make the data of the census unreliable. This went to the High court and on March 17, the office for National Statistics backed down. So now those questions will not be able to be answered in the way that they had intended. Now there will be a review of the usefulness of the 2021 census data in 2023 to see if it survives for another CE census in 2031. But an important metric for that survival will be the data and identity, because it's particularly hard to gather from other sources and has kept the census helpfully relevant to local authorities and businesses. So all this debate might have an impact on the future of the census itself.

Elliot, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you very much, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and see you back here tomorrow.

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