agricultural sectors in the long-term, though in reality, they are a low-income/poor sector.
During the sixties and seventies, all ASEAN countries jointly promoted owner-farmers in the agricultural areas, in Indonesia and the Philippines who already had a high agricultural share, the percentage of owner-farmers was raised by around 10% within ten years, and Thailand showed the same trend. The support for agriculture was an important political issue as significant non-agricultural development wasn't expected at that time. However, the expansion of the economic scale wasn't noticeable and the introduction of foreign capital which was increasing at that time was mainly in manufacturing, and there were not enough conditions to increase agricultural efficiency. As a result, farmers relied on non-agricultural income and according to the planning data from Malaysia, the poverty ratio in rural areas was continuously three times greater than in urban areas. Although the degree of man-power surplus was gradually eased by the shift to manufacturing in the rural areas, it is a long way from achieving equity between agriculture and manufacturing.
4. Influence of Trade on Industrial Structural Change
We must note the role played by trade in the rapid development of manufacturing in the industrial structure. The percentage of manufacturing trade in all ASEAN countries was zero except 2% in Malaysia in 1970. However, it rose to 38% in Malaysia and around 20% in the Philippines and Thailand by 1992, and closely follows the Asian NIE's. (See Table 6)
It goes without saying that the percentage of primary industries in the export structure of all ASEAN countries was high in the seventies, and was still high in the eighties with an average of around 70%, reaching a peak of 94% in Indonesia, and had a strong resource export characteristic.
The causes of the significant change in the industrial and export structure are what the developed countries, including Japan, defined as the change to a
