How poor is Vietnam compared to the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia?

Here's how these ASEAN economies rank.

I am using GDP per Capita as a tool to measure roughly the average income level of the countries, thus analyzing their historical economic progress. World Bank has cited GDP per Capita benchmark of USD12,500 for high income and developed countries.USD4,000 for middle income and developing countries.

The 2nd most developed economy in ASEAN behind financial hub Singapore, Malaysia is on the verge of being a developed economy after running consistently impressive growth for many decades. It has strong prospects for the long term future, despite recent political difficulties. Present day Malaysia is at the levels of South Korea and Taiwan in the early 1990s, when they were just established as developed economies.

There's no obvious reason why Malaysia won't catch up to South Korea's developments in the next 20–30 years. Their growth has been consistent over the past few decades and are proven to be quite resilient to crises. They have a healthy diverse economy driven mostly by the manufacturing and services sector, which is a standard model of high income countries. Their services sector, mainly tech, ecommerce and banking are expanding larger and larger into neighboring ASEAN countries. They handled the middle income trap pretty well and even with maturing slower growth rates, they are expected to be fully developed quite soon.