Plenty has been written about the political and economical aspects of regionalism, but the legal perspective has been neglected. East Asian Regionalism From a Legal Perspective is unique in synthesizing legal, economic and political analyses. In the first part, the book investigates the current features of regionalism from a comparative perspective, looking at economic and currency cooperation and comparing Asian regionalism with Europe and Latin America. In the second part, the contributors go on to look at the present legal features of regionalism, covering institutional frameworks, trade diversity and regional integration. The third part of the book is truly unique in proposing an essential groundwork for the institutionalisation of an East Asian Community. It conceives a draft East Asian Charter, an essential document that distils what East Asian nations have achieved, and also includes integral principles and fundamental rules for future cooperation among countries and peoples in the region. This book will be of interest to graduates and academics interested in regionalism, international relations, international law and Asian studies.

This book applies a spatial economics perspective to the understanding of the recent dynamism of the global economy, with particular focus on East Asia, and examines the prospects of regional integration in East Asia.

The shift of economic gravity towards East Asia requires a critical examination of law's role in the Asian Century. This volume explores the diverse scholarly perspectives on law's role in the economic rise of East Asia and moves from general debates, such as whether law enjoys primacy over culture, state intervention or free markets in East Asian capitalism, to specific case studies looking at the nature of law in East Asian negotiations, contracts, trade policy and corporate governance. The collection of articles exposes the clefts and cleavages in the scholarly literature explaining law's form, function and future in the Asian Century.

During the 1980s and 1990s Asian 'developmental states' attracted much attention in political science and economics literature, but the role of law in the economic development was neglected. It was only after the Asian crisis of 1997 that many analysts began to focus on a lack of regulation and transparency as a major factor triggering the crisis. The crucial questions now are how successful the current reforms will be, and which features of the Asian approach to commercial law will be resistant to reform pressures. This book examines the prospects for commercial law reform in Asia, giving particular attention to Japan and Singapore, as frequently cited role models for Asian developmentalism, and also examining development related business laws in countries such as China, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The massive and complex process of change in East Asia over recent decades has brought about a transformation in the nature of law and legal institutions in the region. Whilst the process of change has to some degree mimicked western models of law and legal change, there have been significant differences in approach due to the different social foundations of East Asian societies. The more obvious of these has been the variety of ways in which rule of law ideas have been adopted in many East Asian countries where the role of the state is more dominant when compared with Western models. This volume brings together a selection of the most important writings on East Asia of researchers in recent years, and shows the broad range of questions which researchers have been addressing about the effect of law reform and legal change in societies dominated by traditional values and political forces, and at a time of massive economic change.

Examines both actual and potential developments in North-East Asian regionalism, from various levels and fields of analysis, considering cooperative and integrative structures and processes. Particular reference is made to the contemporary experience of Europe, which provides important models of cooperation and integration in both the government an