Quotes of the Day

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.

Even in Indonesia's Aceh region, closest to the epicenter, ExxonMobil's natural gas operation outside Lhoksuemawe on Sumatra's northeastern coast was running at full steam only hours after the quake. Thailand's tourism industry will take a hit, yet most of the country's main tourist spots were spared. On the beach-resort island of Phuket, 3,000 hotel rooms were damaged or completely washed away, but 70% of the island's hotels were operating normally a few days after the waves roared ashore. Although Thailand became the first country to downgrade its 2005 GDP growth estimate, the government shaved a mere three-tenths of a percentage point from the forecast, to 5.8%. Tourism dollars generated by six Thai resort areas swamped by the tsunami generate about $2 billion annually, an amount that represents just a fraction (1.3%) of total annual GDP.

Viewed on a macro scale, the natural disaster won't create as much economic chaos as the SARS outbreak did in 2003, economists say, even though the virus claimed just 729 lives in Asia. "It's all a matter of duration," says Enzio von Pfeil, chairman of Commercial Economics Asia, a consulting firm. "The tsunami is a one-off slam. SARS took a long time to fade out." Any impact, according to economists, will likely be limited to the first few months of 2005—after that, relief funds, reconstruction and increased government spending in disaster areas might even give surviving local businesses a boost and provide at least temporary employment to the displaced. Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has been the quickest to start the rebuilding process by approving a $715 million relief package and launching a $770 million loan program for ruined businesses.

Other countries face a much more uncertain future. Sri Lanka's economy was starting to recover from decades of civil war following a 2002 cease-fire between the government and Tamil separatists; investment was flowing into new hotels and other facilities as entrepreneurs began to build a tourism industry around Sri Lanka's beautiful beaches and quaint towns. Now the once promising tourist business will be "set back by three years," says Nizam Idris, an economist at research firm IDEAglobal in Singapore. "It will impact the economy quite severely." The tsunami tore up railways and roads and destroyed 100,000 homes and 15,000 vehicles. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse said the losses "will be in the region of billions of dollars."

Nor do arid economic forecasts reflect the apocalyptic impact the disaster has had on millions of Asians, the vast majority of them poor, who no longer have the means to support their families. In the Sri Lankan coastal town of Galle, Keerthi Mudalige stood amid the remains of the Deli Cabin restaurant, which his family had run for half a century, worried not only about his own future but also the fate of his 60 employees. "I can't take care of them now," he says.

Along the coasts of Sri Lanka and India's Tamil Nadu province, entire fleets of fishing trawlers and small boats were wiped out, docks were washed away, and fish-packing and drying houses damaged. In Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, seafood quickly vanished from restaurant menus. Estimates of the losses to India's fishing industry reach as high as $1 billion. It could take months for many fishermen to claim relief funds, replace their boats and get back out to sea. In the Indian town of Akkripatai, built on a sandbar off the Tamil Nadu coast, the waves came just as fishermen and buyers were crowded into a Sunday-morning fish market. Around 1,000 boats from Akkripatai and neighboring towns broke from their anchors and ropes and rode the surf through the villages, razing palm-thatched houses to their foundations. "It's complete livelihoods that have been lost," says Sunder Ramaswamy, director of the Madras School of Economics. "The question of how we get these people back on their feet now is going to be a huge development issue." Amid so much destruction, the tsunami may tax Asia's poorest economies for years to come.

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