Yesterday, the World Bank updated its database to include the new 2025 datapoints. The updates also redefined the institution’s income classifications.
The data shows what is expected: Malaysia has indeed made further progress towards attaining high income status. In fact, Malaysia is now the closest it has been to being reclassified upward. In 2025, Malaysia’s GNI per capita (Atlas method) was recorded at 86.1% of high income threshold, which represents 2.5-percentage point improvement from 2024 (83.6%). The last peak was in 2019 when the ratio was 85.8%.
Judging by events this year so far, despite challenges, I am willing to bet that the upward momentum will continue in 2026. Still, there is some ways to go and the more interesting question is, when would Malaysia graduate up?
The easiest—but not the most realistic—way to estimate that is to assume a straight line trajectory: at 2.5-percentage point ratio increase per year means Malaysia would need about 6 years to get there, i.e. 2031.
Yet, that straight line assumption unlikely to hold. Recent strong growth rates, wide inflation differentials between Malaysia and the world as well as an ever strengthening ringgit would not be easy to replicate over that period.
So, it would likely take longer than 6 years. If I were to give a target, the earliest is by the middle of the next decade. The latest, 2040.
Racing against others
Malaysia is not the only one moving up in the world. Several economies have overtaken Malaysia over the past decade or so and this could be understood by looking at Malaysia’s ranking. In 2025, Malaysia was the 88th richest economy based on GNI per capita (Atlas) calculation. In 2010, Malaysia was the 80th richest (out of 200+ economies). Eight economies have shot past Malaysia within that timeframe.
None of these economies is more impressive than China. If Malaysia is on the cusp of reclassification into high income category, then China’s fate feels inevitable with its ratio at 99% in 2025. China surpassed Malaysia’s GNI per capita in 2020 during the the heights of Covid-19 pandemic and the Malaysian political crisis. Malaysia has been playing catch-up ever since and has recently got its act together.
More progress in the neighborhood
But in the latest data release, Malaysia and China are not the stars of the year.
The stars are the Philippines and Vietnam. In 2025, both for the first time have been reclassified upward from lower-middle income to upper-middle income.
With the graduation of the two, that means there are only Cambodia, East Timor, Laos and Myanmar left in the lower-middle income group. Of these four, Cambodia is the next candidate for graduation. Myanmar, of course, is at war with itself.
That said, Indonesia could lose its status as an upper-middle income economy if the trouble there persists. The steep fall of the rupiah is something to watch out. Even so, the country’s 2025 ratio increased, which shows a kind of resilience the financial markets tend to ignore.
The crazy actually rich Asians
On the other side, Singapore and Brunei are obviously up there.
But Brunei is another economy to look out for. For some years now, the economy has been struggling. In my mind, its excessive reliance on petroleum production (which is declining), limited progress on economic diversification and the pegging of the Brunei dollar to the Singaporean dollar are the primary sources of their economic pain.
The song Begawan Solo used to play regularly on Malaysian television. It is an Indonesian serenade in the form of keroncong describing the longest river in Java.
Solo is one of the great rivers of Southeast Asia and when I think of great Southeast Asian rivers, the Salween, the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya would come to mind. Adding to the list is possibly the Kapuas and the Musi. But the greatest without doubt is the Mekong.
The Mekong River flows from the Himalayas, snakes through southern China and defines the contemporary boundaries of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia before empties out into the South China Sea just south of Saigon.
The Mekong is the great river I am most familiar with. From the air, I have seen the river and its delta in Vietnam. I have been to Phnom Penh twice over the span of 14 years and marveled at the transformation of the city. I have walked the streets of Vientiane during what appeared to be a dry season when the river to the west looked meek with people walking across to either get into Thailand or Laos. Further upriver in Luang Prabang where I spent several weeks, the river was wide and fierce. To cross it as many did at the Laotian capital would be pure madness. I have been through the Chiang Khong border checkpoint, where the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge crosses a gentler Mekong. And more recently, I have been to Sop Ruak where the Thailand-Myanmar-Laos tripoint is.
While geographically and politically familiar with the river, I had never really thought about the history of its exploration until when I picked up a little gem from Tintabudi bookstore some months back. It is Milton Osborne’s River Road to China. I am familiar with Osborne from a long time ago when I took a class on Southeast Asian history at Michigan. His work was one of the references we used in a class ran by Victor Lieberman.
River Road to China recounts the 1866-1868 French expedition’s attempt to locate the source of the Mekong and determine whether it was navigable. Based on my previous travels and embarrassingly basic geographical knowledge of the river, I would have bet it was navigable all the way up to at least the Myanmar’s section. At each section of the river that I have visited, the Mekong is wide except in Vientiane during what appeared to be a drought.
With a more limited geographical knowledge but with a whole lot more courage (or bravado), that was exactly the suspicion of the French empire, which was expanding its influence across the Indochina in competition with the British. The French were looking for inland access to southern China via the Mekong, while the British were doing so through the Salween in Myanmar. There was race to Yunnan and the supposed riches of southern China.
The French expedition led by Ernest-Marc-Louis de Gonzague Doudart de Lagrée and also later Marie Joseph François Garnier met their first challenge near Sambor, approximately 200km to the northeast of Phnom Penh by river. The Sambor rapids were difficult but it could be negotiated, especially with stronger ships of the mid-19th century. de Lagrée, his men and local guides definitely did with more primitive boats after a struggle that came physically and psychologically.
The principal expedition members at Angkor in 1866. By Émil Gsell.
de Lagrée had been to the Sambor rapids before and he had thought it was impossible to pass. But the expedition did pass the rapids and that raised hope.
That hope was quickly dashed. The Khone Phapheng Falls at the modern Laotian border are the uppermost reach of navigable Mekong. Khone Phapheng Falls are in fact the widest waterfall in the world. I never knew that, thinking Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border being the widest. But no. The Khone Phapheng Falls have a width of nearly 11km, Iguazu is only nearly 3km.
Unlike the Iguazu that rises close to 100 meters, the Khone Phapheng is just 21 meters tall in a series of cascades. In many ways, the Laotian falls are a gentle feature. But that was enough to block any steamship from going upstream. Years later, the French ended up building a rail line to sidestep the problem presented by the Falls.
Now knowing the Mekong was unnavigable, there was still an objective left: find the source of the Mekong. And so, the expenditure pressed on but in a disastrous fashion due to tropical diseases, the limits of French medical knowledge of that time, political realities of the Indochinese interior and simply, European imperial arrogance. de Lagrée in fact spent a second half of the expedition suffering from what seems to be malaria and died unceremoniously in Yunnan away from the Mekong after a failed surgery. de Lagrée shared the fate of another French explorer, Alexander Henri Mouhot, who popularized in Europe the ruins of Angkor but died out of malaria. Mouhot is buried in a tomb in the outskirts of Luang Prabang.
The rest of the team attempted to look for the source but they eventually abandoned the mission due to a civil war in Yunnan between Muslim rebels and the Chinese imperial forces. It was too dangerous to proceed.
While there was strong suspicion about the location of source of the Mekong by the end of the 19th century, it was only truly discovered by the 1990s technology. We today know that the Mekong originates from Lasagongma Spring, deep in the Tibetan Plateau.
Finally, there are two other points I would explore slightly further.
One, the expedition played a role in expanding French influence in Southeast Asia. During the expedition, France controlled the Mekong delta (French Cochinchina) but one surviving member of the expedition, Garnier, briefly captured Hanoi on the delta of the Red River in northern Vietnam on the pretext of securing free river passage in yet another attempt to access Yunnan but this time, via the Red River. While he died in a battle near Hanoi and the city itself was liberated by the Vietnamese soon after, in the longer run, France ended up ruling the whole of Vietnam because Garnier showed it was possible.
Two, I wonder if there were non-Europeans who had traversed the length of the Mekong before the French exploration. It seems quite plain that the locals who worked as porters and navigators for the French knew about the rivers more than their employers. More than that, there were Malay fishmongers all the way from the Malay Peninsula in Phnom Penh when de Lagrée spent days dining with the Cambodian king, Norodom I. He was familiar with the king given that earlier, he played a role in forcing Cambodia to become a French protectorate. More curiously, there were Malay bombmakers as far north as Dali, the northernmost city along the Mekong that the French explorers visited. If there were Malays along the upper reaches of the Mekong, surely it would not be an overreach to expect others like the Thais, Laotians, Cambodians. Vietnamese, Chinese or any other local groups that had explored the river.
Within Southeast Asia, it is at its starkest in Vietnam.
I have been to Laos with its own nominally communist government. The hammer and the sickle would adorn lamp posts and facades in Vientianne and Luang Prabang, reminding tourists and locals alike the insecurity of those in power. But deep in the Mekong heartland, commercialization is still at its infancy, rugged and all. There are contrasts, but not like how it is in Vietnam, where consumerism is embraced wholeheartedly decades after American troops were chased out, sparking Malaysia’s first refugee crisis.
Malaysia received those Vietnamese refugees about 30-40 years ago, unwillingly. They are grateful to us, it seems, regardless of our intention.
Not much has changed today as Malaysia experiences its third refugee crisis, the second, I think, being the one caused by the civil war in southern Philippines. This time around, the new refugees from Myanmar are just a political football game to be played by the corrupt.
