Suchergebnisse

The article is about the motivations and reasons for the United States and Singapore to sign an FTA, prompted by little trade expansion and snail-paced financial market opening within ASEAN, the Japanese-led resistance to the full flowering of APEC, the chronic breakdown of the WTO's recent trade liberalization negotiations, the structural changes in Singapore's economy, as well as unsettled security environment in Southeast Asia. Soon after the FTA went into effect, Singapore and the United States signed a strategic ("defence") partnership agreement. Since 9/11, the two countries have found strong complementarity in each other's strategic visions - how to define the evolving security landscape for Southeast Asia, how to coordinate security responses for the region, and how bilateralism can be a viable fall-back position in cross-border trade and finance. The article also examines the inadequacies of the theories of old regionalism and suggests different ways to theorize new regionalism, identifying the domestic, regional, and global factors which have led to the paradigm shift in Singapore's strategy for future growth and survival and which have shaped the future East Asian policy of the United States. (Contemp Southeast Asia/GIGA)

Small and medium-sized free trade agreements have inherent difficulties in growth and expansion in the global economy which amounts to more than US Dollar 30 trillion. Neomercantilist ASEAN's share of the global exports was 6.5 per cent in 2000, while that of neoliberal MERCOSUR was less than 2 per cent. Furthermore, the trade within ASEAN has not been growing for the past three decades, averaging about 20 per cent of the total volume. MERCOSUR's average has been on par with ASEAN's. This article argues that the two regional markets have reached the optimum point of intra-regional trade creation under the existing political economy models. Post-11 September security issues are further complicating the regional integration. The two regions need to revisit the existing inter-state alliance structure and invent new security regimes. The alternative is not whether the two regions must retain neomercantilism or reject neoliberalism; rather it is how to blend the two systems so that the model can satisfy the domestic political needs and at the same time to enable economic growth in the next phase of globalization. (Contemp Southeast Asia/DÜI)

Financial globalization in the 1990s effectively dismantled the Asian developmental state and forced East Asia to search for a new political economy model. The paradigm shift in world economic development from state-driven planning to market-driven management has taken place since the late 1980s in Northeast Asia, spreading to Southeast Asia in the 1990s. The access to global capital markets by Asian corporations, both parastatal and private, has effectively reduced their dependency on the state for financial resources. In fact, the Asian developmental state and financial globalization are incompatible and often in conflict. By externalizing financial forbearance, Asian corporations and the global market have forced the state to change. Thus, important political changes have taken place in Northeast Asia and are now also occurring in Southeast Asia. (ISEAS/DÜI)

Blames political shortcomings on the failure of the Plano Cruzado, an economic stabilization plan; the debt problem.