This volume is a benchmark that provides a basis against which future progress can be measured. It establishes in a systematic way how Canadian business is doing—and how it is perceived to be doing—in the rapidly-growing economies of East Asia.¹

The studies in this volume identify and address a paradox: East Asian economies are booming but Canada’s economic presence has been declining.

By objective measures, Canada is selling less to East Asia than East Asia is selling to Canada, and this deficit is growing in spite of growth in Canadian exports overall, and in spite of rapid import...

The world economic map is changing rapidly, altering prospects for Canada’s position in it. One of the drivers of change is growth of the East Asian economies. As theEconomistrecently reported, if current economic growth rates are projected forward 25 years to the year 2020, six of the world’s ten largest economies will be in East Asia. Such a prospect implies a huge market potential for Canadian goods and services. Yet, surprisingly, despite Canada’s advantageous geographic proximity to East Asia relative to most other Western nations, and despite its large East Asian ethnic population, Canada’s trade with the region...

In this paper, we place Canada’s evolving relationship with Japan in the context of the strategic development of large Japanese firms and their changing interest in the Canadian economy. Understanding this strategic development helps to explain why even very early reports on the Canada-Japan economic relationship (Hay, 1972) strongly reflected the nature of Canada’s raw material,food and energy bias, but only noted the potential opportunities in areas like software. We look at why this situation has not changed, and discuss some of the options available to Canadians to alter the structure of the relationship, given current and future Japanese corporate...

As Deng Xiaoping’s seventeen year old “second revolution” has proceeded, China, a growing economic giant, has begun to affect the shape of the world economic map. While Canadian policy has anticipated this development, the response of Canadian business has been mixed. In this paper, we assess the prospects for expanded trade and investment ties between Canada and China, first by examining Canada’s current standing in the China market, and then by identifying the obstacles to expanded business links and some strategies for overcoming them. In the next section, we provide an historical overview of bilateral commercial relations and an assessment...

The economic dynamism of the members of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations¹, reaches back thirty years. Most of these economies are still developing in an established pattern: from subsistence agriculture to export-oriented natural resource extraction and labour-intensive manufacturing for export, and then more recently to higher value-added manufacturing and services. A regional division of labour has developed in Southeast Asia, based on different national comparative advantages and on Singapore’s special role as a provider of sophisticated infrastructure services in communications, transportation and commercial services (Low, 1995).

Rapid growth and diversification have also led to an extensive and pragmatic...

The introduction to this volume notes that Canada’s low share of trade and investment in much of Asia does not necessarily mean that Canadian business is not competitive in the region. It reflects mainly the growing share of economic activity with the United States, which has engaged both business and government policy for some time. Canada’s early presence in some of the East Asian countries may also have been weakened as these countries diversified their contacts in the process of rapid growth.

This is encouraging in the sense that business inefficiency is not likely to be a major barrier to...