East Asia

About: East Asia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17591 publications have been published within this topic receiving 274073 citations. The topic is also known as: Eastern Asia.

Rethinking regionalism: Europe and East Asia in comparative historical perspective

Abstract: Regionally based processes of political and economic integration, security co-operation, and even social identification have become increasingly important and prominent parts of the international system. Nowhere have such processes gone further than in Western Europe. Somewhat surprisingly, similar patterns of regional integration have been steadily developing in East Asia - a region many observers consider unlikely to replicate the European experience. This paper uses an historically grounded comparative approach to examine the historical preconditions that underpinned the formation of the European Union, and then contrasts them with the situation in East Asia today. While the overall geopolitical and specific national contexts are very different, such an analysis highlights surprising similarities and differences, particularly in the role played by the United States in both periods. A comparative analysis allows us to understand and rethink the incentives for, and constraints on, regional integrative processes.

Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies: The Creation and Development of New Firms in Latin America and East Asia

Abstract: This report presents the results of a comparative study of entrepreneurship in Latin America and East Asia. It focuses on the process of creation of new companies. That process is analyzed at three different stages: inception of the entrepreneurial venture, company start-up, and its early development. From the initial motivation to become an entrepreneur to the contacts needed to help solve problems as the business gets underway and grows, a number of factors affect the behavior of potential entrepreneurs. This study aims to identify the leading factors that stimulate or limit entrepreneurship at each stage of the entrepreneurial process in Latin America and East Asia. These leading factors are analyzed, a number of conclusions are drawn, and policy recommendations are reached for promoting entrepreneurship in different socio-economic contexts.

The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan

Abstract: Focusing on the two tumultuous decades framed by Indian independence in 1947 and the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, The Cold War on the Periphery explores the evolution of American policy toward the subcontinent. McMahon analyzes the motivations behind America's pursuit of Pakistan and India as strategic Cold War prizes. He also examines the profound consequences-for U.S. regional and global foreign policy and for South Asian stability-of America's complex political, military, and economic commitments on the subcontinent. McMahon argues that the Pakistani-American alliance, consummated in 1954, was a monumental strategic blunder. Secured primarily to bolster the defense perimeter in the Middle East, the alliance increased Indo-Pakistani hostility, undermined regional stability, and led India to seek closer ties with the Soviet Union. Through his examination of the volatile region across four presidencies, McMahon reveals the American strategic vision to have been "surprinsgly ill defined, inconsistent, and even contradictory" because of its exaggerated anxiety about the Soviet threat and America's failure to incorporate the interests and concerns of developing nations into foreign policy. The Cold War on the Periphery addresses fundamental questions about the global reach of postwar American foreign policy. Why, McMahon asks, did areas possessing few of the essential prerequisites of economic-military power become objects of intense concern for the United States? How did the national security interests of the United States become so expansive that they extended far beyond the industrial core nations of Western Europe and East Asia to embrace nations on the Third World periphery? And what combination of economic, political, and ideological variables best explain the motives that led the United States to seek friends and allies in virtually every corner of the planet? McMahon's lucid analysis of Indo-Pakistani-Americna relations powerfully reveals how U.S. policy was driven, as he puts it, "by a series of amorphous-and largely illusory-military, strategic, and psychological fears" about American vulnerability that not only wasted American resources but also plunged South Asia into the vortex of the Cold War.

The Developmental State: Dead or Alive?

Abstract: Before the 1980s, the mainstream Western prescription for developing countries to catch up with the West assigned the state a leading role in governing the market. In the 1980s, this shifted to a framework‐providing role in a largely deregulated and maximally open economy. Also in the 1980s, it became apparent that some East Asian capitalist economies were growing so fast that they would become ‘developed’ in the foreseeable future, marking them out as completely exceptional. Mainstream economists explained their success as the result of following the Western prescription, while other scholars attributed this rapid growth to ‘the developmental state’. This essay compares these two explanations of successful economic development, concluding in favour of the latter — with respect to the catch‐up decades. But what happened subsequently? Several scholars who accept the key role of the developmental state in the early period of fast industrialization in East Asia now argue that South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have transformed from developmental to close‐to‐neoliberal states. This contribution argues that the erstwhile East Asian developmental states have indeed changed, but they have not transformed into neoliberal states. Rather they have adapted and evolved, but still undertake market‐steering, ‘societal mission’ roles well beyond neoliberal limits. The essay also suggests how other developing countries can learn lessons from their experience.