2 - Economic Cooperation in East Asia: Main Directions, Dynamics, and Scale

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The problems of economic cooperation in East Asia are quite numerous and many-faceted, but proceeding from the formulation stated in the introduction to this book we deem it advisable to consider only one, but obviously the most important, aspect thereof, namely the dynamics of this process in the region at the turn of the century in two principal spheres — foreign trade and investment.

Indeed, even the preliminary analysis of factual data on the development of economic cooperation in East Asia enables one to suppose a priori, before carrying out a statistical analysis, that the main form of this cooperation in the region covers mutual trade and investment. Clearly, these are the two principal areas of economic cooperation that were the first to emerge and are the most developed. There is no doubt, however, that they are being complemented on an ever-increasing scale by mutual ties in other areas: services, technological exchange, labour migration, and others.

The majority of the researchers justly believe that throughout the past decade, at the turn of the century, the scope of mutual trade of East Asian countries grew significantly, and its pace accelerated in comparison with the period of the 1960s to the 1970s. It is also supposed that the investment activity in these countries is now focused to a greater extent than before on the East Asian region itself. As a rule, such assessments are based on isolated, random, unsystematic data, among which statistical proofs are preciously few. This chapter undertakes to create a more comprehensive picture of the development of intra-regional trade and investment ties in East Asia based on the analysis of extensive statistical data.

Mutual Trade

When analysing the mutual trade of East Asian countries, we studied the statistical data on foreign trade of the fifteen countries in the region for a sufficiently representative period — thirteen years from 1990 to 2002, which makes it possible to speak not about a short-term trend, but about the emergence of a long-term tendency in the evolution of the process under study. By this we mean the intra-regional trade turnover of East Asian countries.