Southeast Asia plans to spend an estimated $7 trillion over the next 15 years upgrading infrastructure. There’s a real risk the money may go to waste.
No one doubts the region needs a serious facelift. From Bangkok’s crushing traffic to Manila’s crumbling airports to Jakarta’s floods to Yangon’s power outages, Southeast Asia confronts staggering, and growing, hardware challenges amid the largest urbanization flows humankind has ever seen. Yet an even bigger problem could be the region’s software — the skills, health and education of its work force.
“The missing link is productivity,” says Oliver Tonby, a managing partner at McKinsey in Southeast Asia. “To sustain economic growth, many nations will need to more than double their historic rates of productivity improvement.”
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