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The Politics of Economic Regionalism: Explaining Economic Regional Integration in East Asia. By Kevin G. Cai. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hardcover: 196pp.
East Asia's regional economic integration (or economic regionalism) has made substantial advances over the last two decades. In the early 1990s, it would have been largely inconceivable that Japan, China, South Korea and the Southeast Asian nations would, within twenty years, have developed the various strands of regional cooperation and interdependence that exists today. While many could have predicted back then with some certainty that China would eventually become the key hub in a robust and enlarging "Factory Asia" system of closely bound international production networks, only few would have bet on East Asian states - with all the baggage of deep historic animosity - meeting on a regular and structured basis to advance regional cooperation at the ministerial level in over twenty policy domains. Yet this is exactly what now occurs within the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) regional framework, and this is just one regional fora centred on East Asia among the many that now exist. A regionwide proliferation of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) has, in addition, provided more scope for deepening international economic integration among East Asian countries.
In this book, Kevin Cai offers a concise and insightful overview of the most up to date and...