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351. China and Southeast Asia: The Difference of a Decade

Author:
Catharin Dalpino and Juo-yu Lin
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
Over a span of several years, China's relations with the nations of Southeast Asia have shifted in quiet increments. The accumulated effect, however, has been profound. A concerted diplomatic effort to woo countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which now includes all countries in the region excepting East Timor, has reaped multiple benefits for Beijing. It is beginning to alter the political balance in the region as alignments with extra-regional powers are shifting, however subtly. In some aspects, the change is more dramatic. Economic relations have expanded rapidly; for example, trade between China and Southeast Asia is seventeen times larger today than it was twenty-five years ago.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China, Beijing, Asia, and Southeast Asia

352. Chinese State, Chinese Society: Facing a New Century

Author:
Jae Ho Chung and Zhang Ye
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
The Sixteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was convened during November 8-15, 2002. The Congress reconfirmed the Party's strong commitment to the three key tasks of achieving modernization, accomplishing national unification, and safeguarding world peace and development. The outgoing CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin, on behalf of the Fifteenth Central Committee, emphasized the need for further political changes at the grassroots and presented the target of quadrupling China's gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020. Jiang also projected that China's armed forces would possess fewer but better troops “ with Chinese characteristics. ”
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China and Asia

353. Brookings Northeast Asia Survey, 2002-03

Author:
Catharin Dalpino and Richard Bush
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
This is the third edition of the Northeast Asian Survey, sponsored by the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies of the Brookings Institution. Following this review of developments in the region during 2002, the bulk of the volume is composed of essays that provide mid-term perspectives on internal dynamics in China, Hong Kong, and Japan, on the crisis on the Korean peninsula, and on relations between China and Taiwan and on China and Southeast Asia. All the authors have been affiliated with the Brookings Institution during the 2002-03 year. Most were CNAPS Visiting Fellows or Brookings Federal Executive Fellows.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China, Taiwan, Asia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Northeast Asia

354. Trade and Labor Standards: A Strategy for Developing Countries

Author:
Sandra Polaski
Publication Date:
01-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
A debate has raged between developed and developing country governments for several years over whether or not to establish a global agreement on minimum labor standards that would be enforced at the international level through the World Trade Organization (WTO) or some other mechanism. That debate has become stale and ritualized. In the meantime the world has changed. For developing countries, the environment in which global labor standards must be considered was transformed in 2002.
Topic:
Development, Industrial Policy, International Organization, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China

355. Politics and Property in Transitional Economies: A Theory of Elite Opportunity

Author:
Andrew G. Walder
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Command economies gave communist-era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth. Markets and privatization inject new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders to extract incomes or assume ownership. These opportunities vary with the extensiveness of regime change and the barriers to asset appropriation. Within these limits, they further vary with the concentration and form of economic assets and structural changes induced by reform. Elite advantages are smallest where regime change is extensive and barriers to asset appropriation are high, and in small-scale economies that grow rapidly. In China, there has been no regime change and privatization has been delayed and slow. In the rural economy, elites keep their posts as a source of economic advantage, while low entry barriers to household enterprise and rapid growth have created new entrepreneurial elites. After two decades, rural officials nonetheless enjoy large net income advantages that grow along with the expansion of labor markets and private entrepreneurship. These are not generic outcomes of market reform, but the product of market reform in distinctive political and structural conditions.
Topic:
Communism, Economics, Government, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China and Asia

356. The Chinese Economy: WTO, Trade, and U.S.-China Relations

Author:
Barry Naughton
Publication Date:
01-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
The Chinese economy is showing extraordinary dynamism, which partly reflects the early impact of the commitments in China's WTO accession agreement to liberalize the economy. Incoming foreign investment has increased, and trade has grown rapidly. At the same time, China is grappling with serious economic problems that may worsen in the near future. The most difficult problem in crafting China policy is deciding how to respond flexibly to this extraordinary mixture of dynamism and fragility. Rapid growth gives the Chinese economy remarkable resilience; but deep-seated institutional weakness and stubborn problems of poverty and unemployment create dangers of social and economic disruption. An effective U.S. China policy must navigate between the extremes of over-estimating China's current economic strength and under-estimating her potential.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States, China, and Asia

357. Attracting Investment to China

Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Abstract:
Foreign investment has played an important role in China's economic development for almost a quarter of a century and is vital for that development to continue. But while China has been highly successful in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) so far, and has made significant progress in improving its FDI policy framework, it has not fully exploited its potential to attract investment from OECD countries. To make the most of the potential benefits of joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) and to increase FDI inflows while enhancing their contribution to domestic development China will need to persevere with efforts to bring its laws and regulations into harmony with internationally recognised standards and to ensure they are fully and consistently implemented at local level.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Economics, International Organization, International Trade and Finance, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
China

358. Free Movement of People, Goods, Services and Capital in View of the Context of Stability Pact

Author:
Mladen Stanicic
Publication Date:
02-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Austrian National Defence Academy
Abstract:
The Stability Pact is a strategic concept whose aim is to warrant long- term peace and stability in South-Eastern Europe. It is becoming an indispensable element of the global security structure which is currently being constructed in relations between the big powers, the USA, Russia and China, with the active participation of the United Nations, the European Union, international financial institutions and individual countries. As one of the sponsors of the pact, the European Union is keenly interested in stability and peace among its next-door neighbours, some of whom are covered by the pending eastern enlargement. This enlargement is intended to transcend centuries of civilisational and religious divisions in Europe, the causes of many political and armed conflicts in the past. The vision of Europe in the 21st century, reaching all the way to the borders of the former Soviet Union, is that of a multicultural community encompassing states with diverse civilisational, religious, ethnic and cultural characteristics.
Topic:
Security, Globalization, International Cooperation, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, China, Europe, and Eastern Europe

359. International Trade, Location and Wage Inequality in China

Author:
Songhua Lin
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Models of economic geography predict that transportation costs directly affect demand for goods and the supply of intermediate inputs. One of the reasons that international trade is concentrated in the coastal provinces of China is that they have lower transportation costs in transporting goods to other countries than do provinces in the interior. This paper examines the relationship between the provincial wage rate and each province's access to international markets, and to suppliers of intermediate inputs. A gravity equation is first estimated to construct these 'market access' and 'supplier access' variables. In the second stage, the effect of market access and supplier access on the wage rate is estimated. It is found that about one quarter of the provincial wage differences in the coastal provinces and 15 per cent of the wage differences in the interior provinces can be explained by these economic geography variables.
Topic:
Industrial Policy and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China, Israel, and East Asia

360. Trade Liberalization, Agriculture, and Poverty in Low-income Countries

Author:
Kym Anderson
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This paper offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the WTO's Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty, economic growth and trade, it reports modelling results showing that farm product markets remain the most costly of all goods market distortions in world trade. It focuses on what such reform might mean for countries of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, both without and with their involvement in the MTN reform process. What becomes clear is that if those countries want to maximize their benefits from the Doha round, they need also to free up their own domestic product and factor markets so their farmers are better able to take advantage of new market-opening opportunities abroad. Other concerns of low-income countries about farm trade reform also are addressed: whether there would be losses associated with tariff preference erosion, whether food-importing countries would suffer from higher food prices in international markets, whether China's WTO accession will provide an example of trade reform aggravating poverty via cuts to prices received by Chinese farmers, and the impact on food security and poverty alleviation. The paper concludes with lessons of relevance for low-income countries for their own domestic and trade policies.
Topic:
Agriculture, Economics, Emerging Markets, International Trade and Finance, and Poverty
Political Geography:
Africa and China