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Environmental sustainability is becoming crucial for development, especially in countries grappling with global warming and climate change. This study examines environmental sustainability in small and medium-sized industrial firms across seven East Asian countries from 2000 to 2021. Using the Continuously Updated Fully Modified (CUP-FM) approach, the analysis reveals a significant relationship between state-provided loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and increased CO₂ emissions, underscoring how financial support impacts environmental outcomes. Governance quality plays a key role, with better governance linked to lower emissions, highlighting its importance in fostering sustainability. Unexpectedly, a negative correlation between inflation and CO₂ emissions suggests that inflation might encourage SMEs to adopt more energy-efficient practices. Additionally, higher employment and poverty levels are associated with increased CO₂ emissions, reflecting the difficulties SMEs face in balancing economic growth with environmental impact. Based on these results, East Asian countries are advised to enforce stricter regulations, improve access to green financing, enhance governance and encourage collaboration to advance SME sustainability.

This paper attempts to explain why growth rates and why growth levels differ so much among the 17 economies in East Asia. The EGOIN theory, the Triple C Theory and the S Curve Theory are used in the explanation. The three hypotheses in the three cognate theories are also tested for their general validity against the growth experiences of the 17 economies. Four statistical tables and six specially prepared graphs are used to support the author's presentation.

Not only the wealth, but also the independence and security of a country appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation, with a view to these great objects, ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.

Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791.

This paper examines whether increasing trade intensities among East Asian countries have led to a synchronization of business cycles. It extends the work of Shin and Wang (2004) in two ways: by improving the specification of their business cycle correlation equation and by extending the sample to cover the post-crisis period. The study finds that intra-industry trade, rather than inter-industry trade, is the major factor in explaining business cycle co-movements in East Asia. This result has important implications for the prospects of introducing a single currency in the region.

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile, since (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of "Factory Asia" — in particular, on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created "Factory Asia" is not subject to WTO discipline (bindings); (iii) there is no "top-level management" to substitute for WTO discipline, i.e., to ensure that bilateral trade tensions — tensions that are inevitable in East Asia — do not spillover into region-wide problems due to lack of cooperation and communication. This paper argues that the window of opportunity for East Asian "vision" was missed; what East Asia needs now is "management", not vision. East Asia should launch a "New East Asian Regional Management Effort", with a reinforced ASEAN + 3 being the most likely candidate for the job. The first priority should be to bind the region's unilateral tariff cuts in the WTO.

This paper looks at how Singapore's exchange rate regime has coped with exchange rate volatility, by comparing the performance of Singapore's actual regime in minimizing the volatility of the nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) and the bilateral rate against the US dollar with some counterfactual regimes and the corresponding performance of eight other East Asian countries. In contrast to previous counterfactual exercises, we apply a more disaggregated methodology for the trade weights, a larger number of trade partners and ARCH/GARCH techniques to capture the time-varying characteristics of volatility. Our findings confirm that Singapore's managed floating exchange rate system has delivered relatively low currency volatility. Although there are gains in volatility reduction for all countries in the sample from the adoption of either a unilateral or a common basket peg, particularly post-Asian crisis, these gains are relatively low for Singapore, largely because of low actual volatility. There are additional gains for non-dollar peggers from stabilizing intra-east Asian exchange rates against the dollar if they were to adopt a basket peg, especially post-crisis, but the gains for Singapore are again relatively modest. Finally, the conclusion from previous counterfactual studies that there is little difference between a unilateral basket peg and a common basket peg in terms of stability reduction is confirmed.

A salient feature of the East Asian region is the persistent discrepancy between the progress in de facto and de jure economic integration. East Asia has long been said to be the champion of loose regional economic integration, with deepening intra-regional trade and investment linkages in the absence of any formal cooperative scheme. However, an oft-heard claim is that East Asia has been shifting recently towards an institution-based form of regional economic cooperation, primarily as a result of the 1997–98 financial crisis. Next to post-crisis financial cooperative schemes under the ASEAN+3, the surge of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) involving East Asian countries is thought by some to further substantiate this claim. The objective of the paper is twofold; first, to assess the validity of the aforementioned claim; and second, to examine the links between de facto and de jure economic integration in East Asia compared to other regions of the world. In the process, the sequencing between trade and monetary cooperation is also addressed. The paper starts by providing a candid assessment of the current state of play of economic cooperation in East Asia (de jure integration), both from the trade and the financial/monetary perspective, and highlights the limitations of the formal regional integration movement in East Asia to date. As a next step, it explores the changing nature of intra-regional trade and investment linkages, contrasts it to the situation in other parts of the world such as Europe and examines to what extent this new form of interdependence may be instrumental in making formal regional economic schemes more attractive. A major conclusion is that de facto trade integration may not automatically lead to deeper regional trade cooperation de jure and that its impact is likely to be stronger on monetary cooperation projects.

We develop indicators to measure the degree of economic integration and cooperation among East Asian economies and compare these with similar measures for other regions. Our indicators cover regional integration in trade, investment, financial assets, and people-to-people exchange. We also analyze measures of regional cooperation such as the density of free trade agreements and official policy dialogues. We find that in various Asian groupings, and especially in a group of 16 integrating Asian economies, interdependence in trade, direct investment, financial flows, and other forms of economic and social exchange has increased significantly over time, and now approaches that in the European Union. Nonetheless, Asia's official cooperation remains weak and formal regional institutions remain relatively underdeveloped. To provide insight into the causes of this discrepancy, we also develop quantitative measures of political and cultural similarity of nations, and find that Asian countries have relatively low levels of political and cultural proximity compared to regions such as Europe. The diversity of political interests and cultural values may have hindered more intense cooperation among Asian economies in the past. But if regional economic and social interactions continue to grow, requirements for joint decision-making are also likely to expand, leading to stronger frameworks of official cooperation.

This paper compares the economic integration processes of the European Union and the East Asian nations and comments on the possible reciprocal lessons, if any, that can be drawn to smooth the future paths of the two groups. The most relevant lessons on the EU side rely on strong institutionalization, structural policies, and the monetary union. Lessons from East Asia can be found in regional production networks, trade patterns, and the recent developments in financial cooperation. Both entities are presently facing difficult challenges to progress and growth.

This paper documents and analyzes the rise of emerging East Asian economies as major international investors. Foreign direct investment (FDI) from these economies is rising faster than their economic growth, trade and inward FDI, and the region is by far the most important investor from the developing world. We develop an analytical interpretation of the behavior and competitive strategies of major developing East Asian outward investors. We conclude that the drivers of this outward FDI (OFDI) are generally consistent with the international investment literature. But in addition, particular factors are at work, including the desire for natural resource security, and exceptionally high domestic savings rates. The major challenge for the rest of the world is to accommodate these FDI flows, as part of the global reorientation of economic activity toward East Asia.

To assess the spillover effects of quantitative easing (QE) on return and volatility from the U.S. market to the selected Asian markets, this study applies dynamic correlation coefficient-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to capture the time-varying nature of return and volatility spillovers during non-QE and QE periods of the sample countries. Furthermore, we incorporate the estimated time-varying correlation coefficients and country-specific factors to probe the determinants of the spillover. We find that the U.S. QE policies have significantly affected the correlations between the U.S. and some Asian countries, to which it performs significantly progressive decline in the correlations during the latest QE. Greater stock market liquidity remarkably increases their financial spillovers.

The essential question this paper seeks to answer is whether the business cycle co-movement in East Asia are fostered by internal bilateral trade within the region, specifically, intra-industry trade or by external forces like the influence of the world’s largest economy, namely, the United States. This paper examines the extent and robustness of the relationship between trade intensity and business cycle synchronization for nine East Asian countries in the period 1965–2008. Unlike previous studies which assume away the region’s concurrent connection with the rest of the world, in our regressions we control for both the US effect and the exchange rate co-movement in the region. We find that the coefficient estimates for intra-industry trade intensity remain robust and significant even after controlling for the US effect and the exchange rate co-movement. The findings confirm that regional intra-industry trade fosters business cycle correlations among countries in East Asia.

Probability of forming regional trade agreements (RTAs) will be greater if two countries are closer in geographical distance. This paper extends the meaning of ‘closer’ by considering not only the geographical distance, but also the socio-political distance as well. This paper empirically analyzes whether a causal relation exists between the socio-political factors−the cultural affinity measured by common language, same religion, and a newly introduced composite index of cultural distance and political ties measured by the existence of a military alliance and the level of democracy–and the likelihood that RTAs will form. For such quantitative analysis, this paper applies the estimation techniques of a qualitative choice model (pooled Probit model with cluster-robust standard errors) to the panel data, which covers bilateral country-pairs among 66 countries between 1998 and 2009. In addition, the interdependence of the formation of RTA is also investigated by considering the third country effects. For a feasibility study, we estimate the probability of forming the proposed RTAs in the East Asian region as an empirical application. We find that the formation of RTAs has been strongly and significantly driven by the reduced cultural distance between members and influenced by the interdependence with third countries. Unlike the existing studies, however, the conventional socio-political determinants (religious similarity, military alliance, and democracy) do not significantly matter for the formation of interdependent RTAs. From the feasibility test for proposed RTAs in East Asia, we argue that building closer cultural linkages between countries in the region are prerequisite to realize the formation of the proposed RTAs such as the China-Japan (CJ), the Japan-Korea (JK), the China-Japan-Korea (CJK), the ASEAN$+$3 (10 Association of SouthEast Asian Nations, China, Japan, and Korea), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

The articles is about Kampo drugs and its usage.

We investigate the effect of related party transactions (RPTs) on value relevance and informativeness of accounting earnings for firms based in East Asia. Using a hand-collected sample of 398 listed companies comprising 1194 firm-year observations from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, we find that firms engaging more extensively in RPTs have significantly lower value relevance and lower informativeness of earnings both in the current year and subsequent year than firms engaging less in RPTs. Furthermore, the results indicate that the types of RPTs affect value relevance and informativeness of earnings differently in that the effect of simple and loans RPTs are more negative than complex transactions. The extent of the negative effect of RPTs is lower in Hong Kong and Singapore where investor protection is higher compared to the other two economies. These findings are robust to controlling for firm-specific attributes, corporate governance, ownership structure, earnings quality, and a variety of sensitivity tests. These results are consistent with the conflict of interest view that RPTs compromise the quality of accounting earnings and this leads to the reduction in earnings and market value relationship for firms that engage in RPTs.

This paper reviews the causes of the East Asian financial crisis as they relate to the corporate sectors. It evaluates the performance of East Asian corporations before and after the 1997 crisis in an international perspective. It reviews the policy debate on what triggered the sharp decline. It surveys data and the literature to date and finds mixed evidence any specific hypothesis when considering data at the aggregate level. The performance and financing patterns of East Asian corporations in the years prior to the crisis showed little evidence of weakening performance, also relative to other countries. In some countries, there was evidence of risky financial structures, however, including higher leverage, even though not always noticeable, as transparency was weak. Ex-ante, there was thus little evidence to argue that East Asian countries' corporate sectors were likely major factors in causing the subsequent financial crisis.

Over the last 40 years, China’s development has been breath-taking. Its poor, centrally planned economy has been transformed into a middle-income capitalist one with a strong resemblance to highly successful East Asian economies like Taiwan and South Korea. It is argued here that China had become a developmental state by the mid-1990s, showing most features of its predecessors. At the same time, differences such as its huge size, socialist past, and structural problems have made it increasingly clear that China’s rapid growth rate is unsustainable. Instead of a strong and confident great power, one can only see a vulnerable giant with an inevitably decelerating economy.

Like much of the rest of the world, East Asia (Northeast and Southeast Asia) has recently experienced a democratic “fall” in which several electoral democracies have undergone autocratization. This synchronized with China’s rise through what can be called illiberal realignment as autocratizing regimes in the region have sought increasing material and ideological support from Beijing in the face of Western human rights criticism and occasional (although usually only the threat of ) sanctions. China has viewed this regress as a rejection of “Western-style democracy.” Yet a democratic “spring” which preceded the fall left a legacy of democratic normativity in the region as backsliding regimes continued to seek legitimacy through (however unfair and unfree) elections and (partial) liberalization. Residual democratic normativity combined with geopolitical insecurities have limited the region’s illiberal realignment toward China during this democratic fall.

Many of today's high growth and high value-added businesses are concentrated in the knowledge- and innovation-based industries of information technology, telecommunications, biotechnology, media, software and entertainment. Though the governments of Hong Kong, Singapore & Taiwan (Asian NIEs) have invested heavily in promoting these sectors, they have largely failed to produce internationally competitive firms. We argue that government-led initiatives that were appropriate for economies in the investment-driven stage of industrialisation need to be reformed. As some economic sectors approach the technology frontier, diverse financing arrangements are needed to direct capital to high technology start-ups. To complement existing government-related technology initiatives, a more varied financial infrastructure must be developed.

The transport and chemical production processes of nitrate, sulfate, and ammonium aerosols over East Asia were investigated by use of the Models-3 Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system coupled with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). For the evaluation of the model's ability in depicting their 3-dimensional concentration distributions and temporal variations, modeled concentrations of nitrate, sulfate, and ammonium aerosols are compared with the observations obtained at a ground station in Japan in March 2001 and onboard of an aircraft DC-8 on 18 and 21 March 2001 during the Transport and Chemical Evolution over the Pacific (TRACE-P) field campaign. Comparison shows that simulated values of nitrate, sulfate, and ammonium aerosols are generally in good agreement with their observed data, and the model captures most important observed features, and reproduces temporal and spatial variations of nitrate, sulfate, and ammonium aerosol concentrations reasonably well, e.g., the timing and locations of the concentration spikes of nitrate, sulfate, and ammonium aerosols are well reproduced, but large discrepancies between observed and simulated values are also clearly seen at some points and some times due to the coarse grid resolution and uncertainties of the emissions used in this study. This comparison results indicate that CMAQ is able to simulate the distributions of nitrate, sulfate, and ammonium aerosols and their related species in the troposphere over East Asia reasonably well.