After responding with unprecedented promptness and generosity to the South Asian tsunami catastrophe, the world is starting to feel quite pleased with itself. With over US$4 billion now promised or donated by private citizens and governments, the funds available for relief work are already exceeding the capacity of the devastated areas to absorb them.

Long-term "development" aid - typically directed without obvious effect at the world's most corrupt and badly governed societies - has generated increasing cynicism and attendant "donor fatigue" in many rich countries, but attitudes to disaster victims are far less ambivalent. It also helps in this case that many of the stricken nations are blessed with comparatively rational and progressive political leadership, ensuring that donations are unlikely to disappear into private bank accounts in Zurich, luxury villas or guerrilla wars. They will instead reach the people who need them and be consumed intelligently.

Nevertheless, it would be wise for donors to hesitate before congratulating themselves too effusively. The very factors that make a country such as Thailand an attractive destination for aid are also those that call the charitable impulse into question. Southeast Asia's "Tiger" economies did not reach their present state of relative prosperity on the basis of aid payments and foreign altruism, but rather through rationally pursued trade- and market-based development policies, openness, hard work and anti-corruption efforts. Such nations are rightly proud that they have progressed on their own terms, standing on their own feet.

This is not to question the provision of emergency assistance to devastated areas, but in the case of many Southeast Asian countries - which are no longer poor - money is not the problem. Ships, helicopters, heavy machinery and trained assistance teams that can be rapidly deployed to help survivors make an immediate difference. Generous donations piling up in a charity's bank account may not.

The irony, of course, is that a "deserving" victim probably won't be a victim for long. Since following the regional economic reform track, even India - with a far lower income per head than most nations in the region - has plugged into the "can-do" Asian spirit and sloughed off its self-image as a helpless victim. It turned down overseas financial disaster assistance entirely.

Many of the tsunami-stricken countries have already survived the Asian financial crisis, SARS and avian flu scares, among other recent calamities. They have proved themselves to be resilient, independent and forward-looking, bouncing back from adversity to re-take pole position among the world's sources of optimism and inspiration. The last thing they want - or deserve - is to be re-categorized as objects of pity and dependence.

Tourism makes up 8 per cent of employment in the region, accounting in some cases for over 10 per cent of GDP. The tsunami was an extremely rare "one-off" catastrophe and in most of the stricken countries the physical effects will be rapidly overcome. Trade, tourism and dignity make a far better long-term "aid-package" than hand-outs. Those nervously re-thinking Spring Festival holidays to the beautiful resorts of Southeast Asia should stiffen their spines and stick with their plans.

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