Economic Regionalization in the Asia-pacific: Challenges to Economic Cooperation

This original and comprehensive book provides a unique insight into the development of economic regionalization, with special reference to the Asia-Pacific. It presents international globalization strategies from a historical perspective and then analyses the effects on the development of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Focusing on APEC itself, the author provides a detailed investigation into its organization and agenda, and thorough personal interviews with some of the most influential people who have worked for APEC.

Professor Dutta argues that the core of emerging new economic regionalizational must relate to (i) a map-of-the world view of the region, and (ii) an intraregional, multilateral cooperative effort to map an economic region on to the geographic region. Economic regions formed before World War II such as centre-periphery models and the North-South divide have not been successful as formal arrangements. At the beginning of the 1960s, Western Europe gave birth to a unique model of economic regionalization, now known as the European Union. Economic regionalization in the Asia-Pacific historically followed the West European experiments and eventually developed into APEC. The author examines two major challenges to regionalization in the Asia-Pacific, firstly the limited macroeconomic coordination and secondly the geographical coverage of formal arrangements. Additionally, the institutional growth of APEC was heavily influenced by the now disbanded group of eminent persons. This work contributes uniquely to our understanding and insight of economic regionalization in this area through detailed interviews with former members of this group.

Economic Regionalization in the Asia-Pacific will be especially useful to policymakers as well as scholars of Asian studies, international economics, globalization and trade.