JOHN STANMEYER—VII FOR TIME

ALL WASHED UP: Stranded fishing boats in Sri Lanka

Tallying the Damage
	Asia's engine room wasn't swamped, but the waves wiped out countless jobs and rebuilding may take years
	By Michael Schuman

Posted Monday, January 3, 2005; 20:00 HKT
As daylight faded at the Ban Muang temple near Khao Lak on Thailand's inundated Andaman coast, Pornpimol Praditwong, 24, headed for home after another day fruitlessly searching for her missing father and boyfriend among the corpses that were collected on the temple grounds. Little comfort awaited her back at her family's beachfront Ghan Garden and Bin Resort. All of its bungalows were washed away by the tsunami. Opened a year ago at a cost of $1.8 million, the hotel, her family's sole source of income, had been pounded into driftwood in a matter of minutes. "I don't know what we'll do next," says Pornpimol.

Neither do millions of other southern Asians whose livelihoods have been lost to the sea. Along with fishing boats, shops and vehicles, businesses owned by families for generations and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been swept away. None will be easily or quickly replaced. The tsunami ravaged some of the region's most fragile economies—in Burma, Sri Lanka and Indonesia—which are short of the resources and capital required to rebuild their shattered coastlines. In the Maldives, the government estimates that two years' worth of GDP will be needed to restore homes and ruined infrastructure, such as telecommunications and basic health-care systems. On India's Andaman Islands, Mohamed Jadwet, president of the local chamber of commerce, says the disaster "set us back five years—at the very least." The cost of damage in Thailand may reach $1 billion, and Bangkok-based Phatra Securities figures that the country's tourism industry, only recently recovered from 2003's SARS outbreak, could suffer $770 million in lost business. "This is going to hurt," laments Sompop Manarungsan, an economist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. "We've been very unlucky."

The tsunami hit at a time when Asia's economies, after a relatively strong performance in 2004, were expected to cool off because of high oil prices, a weak greenback, and looming slowdowns in China, Japan and the U.S. Yet despite the horrific death toll, economists say the overall economic impact on South and Southeast Asian economies will be muted. The catastrophe "is going to make the slowdown only moderately more intense than what we expected," says Cliff Tan, director of Asian economic research at Citigroup in Singapore. That's because the worst damage occurred in developing countries that contribute relatively little to the regional economy, and because the vast number of people whose livelihoods have been most affected are simple fishermen and farmers. The factories, high-tech research centers and ports that drive Asia's growth escaped unscathed except for a few mishaps—for example, 1,173 Hyundai cars, worth about $5 million, were submerged on a dock in India.

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