Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Today, we're going to unveil the Economist's Country of the Year for 2021, the place that

most improved over the past 12 months. We'll speak to the editorial staff to run through which

countries they nominated and why. Settling on a winner this year or even nominees wasn't easy.

Improvement was pretty hard to find no matter which region we examined. Before we get to the

shortlist, we're going to look at one region that offered up no contenders whatsoever, a region

that typified that slow slide of civic conditions, South and Southeast Asia.

Some analysts talk about what's happening as a sort of democratic recession, but the term recession

really implies something cyclical within never to be recovery. You hit the bottom and then you

you start going back up. The problem is in much of Asia that's a heroic assumption.

Leomorani is our Asia editor and is based in Mumbai. Across the entire continent,

the pandemic has given leaders the opportunity to flex their authoritarian muscles and they've

been expanding the limits of their power. So where is this happening? Where's it not happening?

Jason Mustartwood, Southeast Asia that had a particularly bad 2021, especially Myanmar,

which had a coup on February 1st. It's army chief seized power and has since ruled with terror.

It's now the second coup-led military dictatorship in the region after Thailand. A very bleep joke

doing the rounds had the head of Myanmar's junta asking Thailand's now prime minister how to set

up a proper democracy. That's two countries. You add to that the Leninist dictatorships of Laos

and Vietnam. You have an absolute monarchy in Brunei and you have Cambodia where Huntsend's room

is approaching 37 years. It's a pretty dismal picture. That's Southeast Asia.

Well, what about South Asia? Southeast Asia, not often very much hope either. We have the Taliban

...