Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

A bunch of countries in east Asia are working on a free trade agreement. The people in these countries make up 30% of the world's population. 

I'm reading Tyler Durden's post about this and there is a chart of numbers and I don't like the format. The numbers are all left justified, makes it hard to see what's going on, so I muck around 

(save the image, run it through a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service, edit with a text editor to clean it up a bit) 

and then import it into a spreadsheet. Now I can play with it. Lists of numbers like this call for a graph, but none of graphs I call into existence really show me anything useful. Then I realize what we need is GDP per person, so I add that column. Now we have some numbers that mean something.

The top five are no surprise. Number six, Brunei, is kind of a freak, a tiny country on the island of Borneo that just happens to be "the fourth-largest producer of oil in Southeast Asia". Then we have China, Malaysia and Thailand that seem to be doing okay. And then we have the bottom six, who maybe aren't doing so well. That the Philippines are below Vietnam was kind of surprise, but maybe not. Filipinos make up a third of the crews of most of the cruise ships in the world. Working on a cruise ship is not far from slave labor. If that many people are looking for slave labor gigs overseas, things can't be too good at home. Plus we've got a jihadist revolution percolating there.* 

Seems Capitalism worked in some of these countries (the top five again). A couple suffered Communist revolutions (China and Vietnam) and are making progress. You'd think that the Philippines would be doing better what with it being a mostly an English speaking, Christian country with strong US backing, but maybe that's the problem. South Vietnam's corrupt government had US backing as well.

* It took me a while to find this post. Searching for philippines missed it. Searching for philippine would have found it, but Blogger's search function is rudimentary at best and I didn't think of it. Searching for winning finally turned it up because I remembered that from the blurb I quoted.

P.S. The chart in Tyler Durden's post was an image of the chart in Visual Capitalist's post. The chart format in Visual Capitalist's post is still piss poor, but at least it was text, so I could have copied it directly instead of going through the OCR business.