Poor Laos? (by Joe)

By any standard economic measure, Laos is extremely poor. Yet this could be a little misleading - we encountered poverty but not great deprivation.

Many Laos people live rurally. They raise their own livestock, fish their own dinner (see top), grow their own crops and barter is a central means of transaction. Yet none of this shows up in GDP measurements of wealth.

A great many may not have electricity, telephones, cars or domestic appliances (nor do they eat a lot of Pringles or drink much Coca-Cola), but they seem to know how to live successfully with what they have: they are generally clean, well-fed, healthy and remarkably content. We encountered only one beggar in Laos (we have encountered many more everywhere else we've gone, including Thailand).

We definitely wouldn't describe them as 'desperate' or 'deprived' in the way that we saw desperate poverty in India.

I hope I'm not sounding naive - life is hard, and, to put it mildly, there are very limited opportunities to progress, but they seem to lack very few genuine essentials.

Standard analyses of wealth are not neccessarily standard analyses of well-being.

Joe