A decade of opening and reform lifts growth

After decades of military-era isolation and mismanagement that held Myanmar among the poorest and slowest-growing economies in Southeast Asia, the charts turn sharply upward starting around 2011. A transitional military government began loosening political and economic controls that year, leading to the lifting of many international sanctions and Myanmar's first contested democratic elections in 2015, and the resulting wave of foreign investment, trade liberalization, and donor re-engagement pushed annual GDP growth to an average of around 6% between 2011 and 2019. The World Bank's own assessment of this period credits the reforms and the lifting of sanctions directly for the acceleration, alongside significant poverty reduction as growth broadened beyond the military-linked conglomerates that had dominated the pre-2011 economy. Even so, the underlying political economy remained fragile throughout the reform decade, with the military retaining substantial constitutional power and economic interests untouched by the democratic opening. That fragility is precisely what makes the sharp reversal after February 2021 legible on the chart: the growth decade was real, but it rested on a political settlement that proved temporary rather than a durable structural transformation.