East Asian Dynamism continues to offer a succinct account of Pacific regional political economy from the dawn of the modern world system to projections of alternative futures. Steve Chan is a master at demystifying the geography, history, and culture of the region while bringing to life the current policy choices and dilemmas facing its people

Asia-Pacific in the New World Order critically explores the notion that a distinctive regional power bloc is developing linking countries bordering the Pacific, with East Asia at its core. This student-friendly volume sheds light on the complex interplay between global, regional and national forces which have transformed the Asia-Pacific area into one of the most vibrant and economically successful regions in the world. Historical narratives alongside geopolitical and geoeconomic perspectives are deployed to examine the shifting pattern of power relations and security structures across the region, set within a wider world context. Key issues addressed include: * what are the primary security problems of the region and how are they being resolved? * does the dynamic growth of the region, and particularly the rise of China, pose a challenge to existing structures of world order? The text has a strong interdisciplinary flavour drawing on analytical approaches from the international relations, political economy and political geography literature. Authors have been drawn from the Asia-Pacific region and the UK and all are established scholars in their specialist fields.

This important new text examines the crucial social and cultural factors associated with the rise of the Asia- Pacific region at the end of the Twentieth Century. It takes a close look at those areas which have affected the everyday life of the people most directly. These include: * the family * gender relations and the position of women * religion * the arts, with specific reference to film * ethnic relations and population migration * education, and the images of the Asia-Pacific. The authors discuss real tensions between tradition and modernity in different nations of the Asia-Pacific, exploring the effects that economic growth has on powerful traditional cultures.

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been an acceleration in the move from government regulation towards privatization. Governance, Regulation, and Privatization in the Asia-Pacific Region is the first thoroughgoing account of the relative success of the different approaches to privatization as undertaken in Korea, China, Australia, and Japan. In most contexts, privatization is expected to yield greater efficiency and cost effectiveness while avoiding the corruption and bloated budgets of government regulation or monopoly control. But broad-scale privatization, if ill designed, has also yielded its share of difficulties in East Asia. Privatization sometimes has created a vacuum in corporate governance for some of the region's most important industries and in some cases merely reinstated the monopoly-like configurations. The papers presented in this book discuss the experiences of privatization in several industries, including railroad and telecom, corporate governance problems, accounting issues, and challenges for the future in East Asian countries. The first section is theoretical in nature and proposes boundaries among government protection, market freedom, and shareholder expectations. The second part is constituted by country case studies, beginning with an analysis of both the Korean financial crisis that followed its 1997 law to privatize large, public sector corporations and the new ways Korean corporations finance themselves. Following is an evaluation of China's approach to privatization, with an in-depth look at the financial transitions of companies slated for initial public offering. Providing provocative examples of the methods of privatization in the Asia-Pacific region specifically, these papers will be of huge import to any economist or policymaker interested in transposing those successes for their own region.