Asia Europe Journal最新文献

Ten-member countries formally submitted their ratifications, reaching the activation threshold for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest global free trade agreement, which officially came into effect for these nations on 1 January 2022. Our study combines macroeconomic forecasts with policy impact assessments, utilizing the GTAP model and dynamic recursive methodologies to predict the impact of RCEP’s implementation on its member countries and the global economy. Our findings reveal the following: (1) The countries benefiting most from RCEP’s enactment are Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, and Thailand. (2) In the short term, RCEP benefits ratifying nations, whereas non-effective ratifying and non-member countries experience varying economic losses. (3) However, over the long term, the economic spillover effects of RCEP are projected to foster global economic development, enhance social welfare, and increase global trade. Based on these conclusions, China and Southeast Asia should expedite the integration of the “Belt and Road” initiative with RCEP, tightly interlinking with the regional industrial and supply chains within the RCEP area to enhance the competitiveness of domestic industries and enterprises.

This paper analyzes Vietnam’s growing economic integration with the rest of the world, illustrating its changing position in global investment and trade amidst recent US-China geopolitical competition, in addition to longer-term supply chain reorientation. Examining longitudinal data on foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade over the past two decades, the paper makes three arguments. First, the East Asian economies have collectively emerged as significant providers of FDI to Vietnam. In particular, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have challenged and even usurped the EU and the USA, especially in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. This also suggests Vietnam’s tighter integration into what is loosely termed “Factory Asia.” Second, Vietnam has indeed become a “connector economy” interlinking the US and Chinese economies. Vietnam’s imports are heavily dependent on key Northeast Asian economies, particularly China, while its exports are largely driven by demand from the US market. Our analysis demonstrates Vietnam’s conformance to the “supply in East, consume in West” model that earlier regional industrializers adopted in their high-growth era. Third, Vietnam’s openness towards FDI has indirectly stunted its domestic technological advancement. FDI has largely been directed towards export-oriented industries that are usually enclaved, resulting in modest linkages with Vietnam’s domestic firms. Bypassed by such FDI, Vietnamese firms primarily operate in cosseted industries like real estate, retail, and other services, with meager involvement in export and long-term capability building.

This paper, which examines the affective landscape created by Chinese nickel investment in Indonesia, seeks to better understand how actors at various scales and networks respond to China’s global rise. While state-centered perspectives dominated analyses of responses to China’s global action, we want to unpack Indonesians’ anxious and hopeful reactions across multiple fragmented but interconnected contexts. The majority of the involved actors, whether national, regional, or local, associate Chinese investment with the nickel industrialization project. Nonetheless, each actor, standing on a different scale and network in front of the project, has their own set of interests and visions for their future with it. National policymakers are establishing it as a symbol of national development success, while others on a national scale are criticizing it, citing how it marginalizes local communities and destroys their environments. On the other hand, local communities and workers are readjusting to industrialization in ways that betray their national actors’ expectations, envisioning their everyday future with the presence of a new giant bringing opportunities and uncertainties.

This study examined the effects of the UK–Korea–Japan free trade agreement (FTA) with the removal of import tariffs and non-tariff measures (NTMs) on real GDP, exports, imports, and welfare using a computable general equilibrium model. The simulation results showed that just using tariff elimination without NTMs leads to underestimation of the effects of the FTA. The trilateral UK–Korea–Japan FTA will be more beneficial than the bilateral UK–Korea and UK–Japan FTAs and will increase GDPs and exports in the UK, Korea, and Japan more over time. In contrast, China, the USA, and the EU will decrease their exports to the UK, Korea, and Japan. Although both the UK and Korea will see large trade creation effects on imports from Japan, China, the USA, and the EU will decrease their imports. The UK–Korea–Japan FTA will also bring much larger welfare gains to the UK, Korea, and Japan than the two bilateral FTAs. Thus, the UK–Korea–Japan FTA will provide more economic gains over periods than the current UK–Korea and UK–Japan FTAs.

Under the slogan ‘Global Britain’, the UK has pursued a range of foreign policy roles. While existing studies focus on the UK’s self-conception of these roles—including a faithful (US) ally, a force for good, a European partner, a Commonwealth leader, a great power, and a global trading state—few have examined other countries’ perceptions in detail. This article examines reactions to these roles of the Chinese government, media, and scholars by drawing on role theory. It reveals two key findings. First, the Chinese government completely rejects the UK’s roles as a faithful ally and a force for good, overlooks the roles of a Commonwealth leader and a European partner, and supports its roles as a global trading state and a great power. Second, while Chinese media and scholars share the government’s rejection of the faithful ally and force for good roles, they somewhat disagree with the government over the rest of these roles. These findings, which highlight the complexity of Chinese role expectations, contribute to studies of British foreign policy, role theory, and China-UK relations.

By illuminating the mode of health crisis management in the four distinct jurisdictions of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the UK, this article considers how varying trust-transparency mixes provide a context for understanding the public governance of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article builds on publicly available surveys, governmental documents, and observations of the assessed administrations’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study covers the period between January 2020 and April 2022. We conclude that though trust is an important element for controlling the virus, transparency is the precondition for a longer-term resilient and sustainable policy response. Trust-transparency mixes matter because they feed through into governance capacity. While transparency is the prerequisite for a longer-term robust and sustainable policy response, trust is essential for managing the virus in the short term. Governance capacity needs to be understood as a contingent, context-specific quality, in the sense of a legitimate steering mechanism.

China’s presence in ECE is characterized by its fragmented structure and continued divergences between societal perceptions and political stances toward Beijing, thereby rendering the exposure to its influence ephemeral. The ECE-China engagements transcend the conventional framework of material-economic considerations, veering into the domain of ideational influences, wherein it predominantly manifests through elite-level identity dynamics and the intricacies of rhetorical politics. Within this premise, the paper employs analytical eclecticism to operationalize theories on normative power and symbolic domination in synthesis with the concepts of liminality and elite capture to explain ECE’s exposure to China. With an emphasis on the historical ideational paradigms and institutional-political dynamics, the paper delineates two pivotal factors that were instrumental in elucidating the contours of regional vulnerability. First, it foregrounds the historical geopolitical liminality of ECE, dissecting its contemporary expression in the strategic rivalry between the development models propagated by the EU and China. This juxtaposition is starkly characterized by a cleavage between Beijing’s pragmatic-driven framework embodied in the 16/14 + 1 platform and ECE’s existence within a values-based paradigm upheld by Brussels. Within this dichotomy of fundamentally divergent development paradigms, ECE nations undergoing an illiberal turn or lacking in resilient state capacity yet striving to assert their geopolitical subjectivity have increasingly displayed an eastward pivot in their foreign relations. Secondly, the paper addresses the interplay between post-communist institutional development and elite formation and their correlation with susceptibility to China’s influence, emphasizing the elite capture phenomenon, predominantly evident among the more authoritarian-leaning countries of the region.

This article empirically investigates the relative effectiveness of political regimes liberal versus conservative in combating corruption in South Korea. Two corruption indices, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) by Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) by the World Bank, are employed to measure corruption levels. Through mean difference analysis and regression analysis, some strong and consistent empirical evidence emerges, suggesting that the liberal regime might have proven more effective in combating corruption in South Korea than its conservative counterpart, assuming that the perceived levels of corruption, as measured by both CPI and WGI, serve as reasonable approximations of the actual level of corruption.

The EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EJEPA) entered into force on February 1st, 2019. The agreement was quickly coined the “cars-for-cheese deal”: Agri-food seemed to be the largest winner on the European side while Japan stood to gain most from automotive exports. Up until the final negotiations, however, agri-food was a major stumbling block. Through a qualitative content analysis of EJEPA coverage in five Japanese newspapers with different political and industry profiles, this article examines media treatment of food as a controversial part of the EJEPA. While narratives differed depending on political and industry leanings, we find that the perceived threat from the EJEPA regarding food was often placed within a larger social imagery of a new global order and disadvantageous trade deals, through a conflation with the recently established Trans-Pacific Partnership and its widely reported impact on agriculture. Lastly, beyond a strongly defensive or even victimized narrative in some specialized media, mainstream newspapers also divert attention toward the potential opportunities the EJEPA brings to Japanese exporters and manufacturers.