Far Eastern responses to globalization

The authors, all staff members of the Japan East and Southeast Asia Research Centre at the Institute for World Economics (JESARC), outline their views on the responses to globalization by some of the main role players in the Far East. The authors reflect their interpretations of globalization by employing various approaches in their analyses. In Chapter 1, András Hernádi, senior research fellow and director of JESARC, shows how Japan, the region’s biggest economy, has responded to the challenges of globalization in an international context. In his view, the main fields of reaction were in regionalism, management reforms, research and development, and foreign policy. The author of Chapter 2, Zoltán Bassa, research fellow, illustrates through the cases of South Korea and Taiwan how smaller, export-oriented economies have sought and found the right answers, i.e. appropriate government policies and structural reforms. In Chapters 3 and 4, Klára Mészáros, senior research fellow, and former Hungarian ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, and András Székely- Doby, research fellow, have put, understandably, more emphasis on the problems related to the internal economies of China and India, respectively. In the world’s two most populous, still less developed economies, the context and impacts of globalization have appeared in somewhat different ways, thus calling for and receiving less direct responses. Chapter 5, by Annamária Artner, senior research fellow, gives an account of the criticisms of globalization made in Asia. She presents the thematic division of anti-globalization organizations and movements and the coordination among them, and shows that their mobilization capabilities are greater than their memberships would suggest.