Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
One of the more remarkable and most important features of Asia’s economic success is the way in which trade growth and economic integration have proceeded apace despite what many thought were high political odds.
Yet, once the economies of East Asia committed to open economic policy strategies, economic relationships across the region burgeoned despite an unusual number of troublesome political relationships. Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
In President Obama’s landmark speech in Canberra last month, an over-riding theme was that the United States welcomes China’s rise so long as it plays by the global rules.
Yet those rules are dynamic, and there is a need to have China involved in setting them given the scale of China and its importance to the regional and global economy, as well as to global security. Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
East Asia’s pursuit of policy strategies of openness to trade and investment have resulted in its being economically one of the world’s most internationally-integrated regions — both intraregionally and towards the rest of the world.
Author: Razeen Sally, ECIPE
It is almost a decade since China’s accession to the WTO. Back then, like a small or medium-sized economy, China imported ‘global order’: it absorbed pre-existing, mainly US-designed policies, rules and institutions.
Now China is one of the Big Three, alongside the USA and EU. It is the world’s second-largest economy (at market prices) and its leading exporter of goods. It is the biggest post-crisis contributor to global growth. Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
The Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) secretary general and power broker Ozawa Ichiro recently took 645 DPJ members and other leaders to China in an unprecedented move for both countries. This is a big step in following up on the DJP’s promise to mend relations with China. There is talk now of making progress on the difficult history issue and of moving beyond it. Other rumours have Prime Minister Hatoyama visiting Nanjing this year — the site of Japanese imperial war atrocities — in exchange for a visit by President Hu to Hiroshima.
The Sino-Japanese relationship has come a long way since a decade ago. Read more…
Author: David Dollar
At the height of the recent boom the U.S. household savings rate dropped to zero: the average American family saved nothing from its annual income of more than $38,000 per person. In China, by contrast, poor rural families earning less than $200 per person save 18 percent of their meager income. This is one of the striking findings of the World Bank poverty assessment released today.
The poverty study uses a wealth of household survey and village-level data to tell a fascinating story of progress and vulnerability. The progress is remarkable: the share of the population living below the World Bank’s consumption poverty line for China declined from 65 percent at the beginning of economic reform (1981) to 4 percent in 2007. The pace of poverty reduction varied over these 26 years. One of the periods of most rapid poverty reduction has been the boom time since China joined the World Trade Organization. Poverty declined from 16 percent in 2001 to 4 percent in just six years.
This is an extract from the East Asia and Pacific on the Rise blog. To read the rest of the article, click here.