Multinationals and East Asian Integration

Providing an examination of civil-military relations in China, this book reflects the changes taking place in Chinese society and their impact on the civil-military dynamic. It explores issues, such as the impact of AIDS, the defense budget, the emerging dynamic between the military and China's leadership, the role of the militia, and more.

Providing an examination of civil-military relations in China, this book reflects the changes taking place in Chinese society and their impact on the civil-military dynamic. It explores issues, such as the impact of AIDS, the defense budget, the emerging dynamic between the military and China's leadership, the role of the militia, and more.

This report documents Asia's progress in regional cooperation and integration. This publication documents Asia's progress in regional cooperation and integration. It covers the 48 regional members of the Asian Development Bank and analyzes regional as well as global economic linkages. The 2018 report's special chapter Toward Optimal Provision of Regional Public Goods in Asia and the Pacific examines how collective action among countries can help find solutions to growing transnational development challenges. The special chapter also discusses how to best provide regional public goods that transcend the so-called collective action problem which occurs when individual interests are too weak on their own to drive cooperation on common issues.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is strategically significant because of its size, dynamism, and role in the Asian economic and security architectures. This paper examines how ASEAN seeks to strengthen these assets through "centrality" in intraregional and external policy decisions. It recommends a two-speed approach toward centrality in order to maximize regional incomes and benefit all member economies: first, selective engagement by ASEAN members in productive external partnerships and, second, vigorous policies to share gains across the region. This strategy has solid underpinnings in the Kemp-Wan theorem on trade agreements. It would warrant, for example, a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement with incomplete ASEAN membership, complemented with policies to extend gains across the region. The United States could support this framework by pursuing deep relations with some ASEAN members, while broadly assisting the region's development.

Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, in 1968. He was deeply pessimistic about development prospects in Asia. The fifty years since then have witnessed a remarkable social and economic transformation in Asia - even if it has been uneven across countries and unequal between people - that would have been difficult to imagine, let alone predict at the time. Asian Transformations: An Inquiry into the Development of Nations analyses the fascinating story of economic development in Asia spanning half a century. Asian Transformations sets the stage by discussing the contribution of Gunnar Myrdal to the debate on development then and now and providing a long-term historical perspective on Asia in the world. It then uses cross-country thematic studies on governments, economic openness, agricultural transformation, industrialization, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, education and health, employment and unemployment, institutions, and nationalisms to analyse processes of change while recognizing the diversity in paths and outcomes. Specific country studies on China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, and sub-region studies on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, further highlight turning points in economic performance and demonstrate factors underlying success or failure. Including in-depth studies by eminent economists and social scientists, Asian Transformations comprehensively examines the phenomenal changes that are transforming economies in Asia and shifting the balance of economic power in the world and reflects on the future prospects for this continent over the next twenty-five years. It is a cohesive and multi-disciplinary study of a rapidly changing economic landscape, and makes an important contribution to understanding the complexities and processes of development from different perspectives.

As Asia grows and prospers, its economies are increasingly vital to each other -and to the world. Led by a team of ADB staff, scholars, and advisers to regional policy makers, this study highlights what is at stake the emerging Asian regionalism and lays out the ground for further discussion on how to move forward.

This book is an important contribution to the policy debate on the future of regional integration around the world, and in Asia in particular. The complex linkages between regional integration and regional cooperation, soft and hard integration, trade facilitation and regional infrastructure are all addressed competently in different chapters of this publication, which should be read by all of those concerned with the future of regional integration and cooperation in Asia. Antoni Estevadeordal, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) As we emerge from the worst global economic setback in two generations, the momentum of Asian economies suggests that this region will redefine the geography of trade and growth even more quickly and decisively than expected. Because Asia offers the largest emerging markets, superior growth rates, and new patterns of trade diversification, this region is becoming the leading edge of the global economy for the next generation. This volume addresses the essential issues related to Asian trade and regionalism with intellectual authority and essential timeliness. Brooks and Stone have assembled leading experts, distilled evidence, and synthesized policy lessons on the salient issues and trends that will drive the world s most dynamic economic region. Their book should be a desk reference for policy-makers and leading private sector players who want to respond effectively to the momentous challenges and opportunities presented by the Asian century. David Roland-Holst, University of California, Berkeley, US This insightful book collects empirical analyses and case studies to clarify issues and draw policy recommendations for facilitating greater regional trade through increased cooperation. Asia s rapid development has been heavily dependent on markets external to the region. However, given the unlikely timely recovery of the United States or Europe there is an urgent need to develop domestic and regional markets. While greater integration has long been a regional goal, its importance has never been more pressing. To facilitate trade and promote growth and regional integration, and to counteract declining markets in other regions, Asian countries have announced large expenditures for developing infrastructure. Thus, a look at how investment in regional infrastructure promotes and supports interregional trade growth has never been timelier. While the focus is on informing policy-making in Asia, the findings also have relevance for other regions. The detailed studies in this book will be of particular interest to academic economists, policy-makers, and the broader development community.

Multinational Corporations and the Emerging Network Economy in Asia and the Pacific delves into the ongoing rise of a global economy anchored in a web of inter-firm production networks and the role played by multinational corporations in the process. It considers the strategies and business models corporations have adopted lately to face today’s highly competitive global markets, especially outsourcing and offshoring, focusing on the modalities observed in Asia Pacific and the Pacific Rim at large. Since their inception, corporations have undergone a series of fundamental changes; each has corresponded to a given era of industrial development and has given rise to a particular type of government policy response. The book addresses these timely issues and other such as the transformation of global production networks into global innovation networks, the link between corporate and national innovation strategies and movement up the global production value chain, and the fragmentation of production and the resulting increase in component and sub-assembly trade in the region. It also takes up the emergence of multinational corporations from developing countries and the efforts aimed at forging basic rules of corporate social responsibility and developing sound institutions for building a working framework of corporate governance in the Pacific. Written by some of the region’s most eminent and influential economists and political scientists, this volume will appeal to students and scholars working in the field of Asia Pacific studies as well as to businesspersons and policymakers taking decisions in the region.