Yangon

Myanmar's GDP has shrunk 11% since 2019, its currency has collapsed from 1,330 to over 7,000 kyat per dollar, and 77% of households are poor or near-poor — yet Yangon, the country's largest city at roughly 5.5 million people, continues functioning as the commercial centre of a state that no longer fully controls it. The military junta moved the capital to a purpose-built city called Naypyidaw in 2005, spending billions constructing a ghost capital in the central highlands that diverted resources from industrial diversification, education, and healthcare.

Yangon kept the port, the factories, the banks, and the population. The 2021 coup and subsequent civil war created what the UNDP calls an unprecedented 'polycrisis': military airstrikes increased from 49 in 2021 to 1,217 in 2024, ethnic armed organisations now control over 40% of the country's territory, and inflation hit 25.4% in 2024. Poverty rates that declined steadily through the 2010s reversed completely.

The standard narrative emphasises colonial architecture and the Shwedagon Pagoda. Yangon now operates as the economic organ of a fracturing state — processing trade, hosting what remains of foreign investment, and serving as the exit point for a population fleeing outward. Half the country faces food insecurity. Western sanctions reduced military equipment imports by 30% between 2023 and 2024, but in 2025 the US quietly lifted sanctions on five junta-linked companies.

This is a system trapped between alternative stable states: neither the military regime nor the resistance can decisively win, so the economy oscillates in a zone of permanent instability where neither state — functioning democracy nor consolidated autocracy — can establish itself. Yangon functions like a tardigrade in cryptobiosis: the organism has shut down most metabolic processes to survive conditions incompatible with normal life, maintaining just enough cellular function to resume activity if conditions improve, but capable of persisting in suspension indefinitely.