The economic success achieved in the last decade in East Asia has brought about a fundamental reorientation in the Western view of the region. In order to contribute to a better understanding of present events and future developments in the area, leading East Asia economists and men of experience in Asian business from Asia, America, and East and West Europe have written papers on their research or business fields for this volume. The individual articles deal with problems common to the East Asian region and the Pacific area as well as with specific economic problems of Japan, China and South Korea. The volume is divided into four parts: East Asia and the Pacific Basin includes articles on supra-national issues, for example on the international economic relations of Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea. Japan includes articles on Japanese industrial and business structure, technological policy, exports and other issues. China includes articles on structural change, economic reforms, fiscal policy, agriculture and other issues. Korea includes articles on economic and industrial policy, restructuring, protectionism and other issues. The occasion of the publication of this volume is the 70th birthday of Willy Kraus, who for many years has been actively concerned with the questions of development in the East Asian region.

The first paper presents an inter-temporal job search model and argues that both emigration and return of Chinese may be strategically planned as an optimal life-cycle residential location sequence. Particularly, it offers an explanation for two interesting phenomena in the context of Chinese immigration: (1) a substantial increase in both emigrants and returnees; (2) Returnees exhibit varying levels of educational degrees. The model attributes these phenomena to three facts: (1) China has a dual labor market with a higher paying modern sector; (2) the benefits of globalization accrue mainly to modern sector workers and; (3) the information revolution in US attracts China's most productive intellectuals. The second and the third papers study the impact of trade variety on regional productivity for China and Canada respectively. The second paper studies the effects of Chinese provincial export variety growth on its technological improvement by applying a monopolistic competition model with endogenous technology. The panel data covers all 31 executive districts of mainland China from 1998 to 2005. The results show that export variety significantly affect productivity growth: it accounts for 44.1% of cross-province TFP differences and 36.6% of within-province TFP growth; a 10% increase in the export variety of all exporting industries leads to a 1.4% productivity increase in China (as a weighted province average). By adding import variety in the empirical model used in the second paper, the third paper consolidates the effects of both import and export variety growth on Canadian productivity. Using balanced provincial data from 1988 to 2006, I find that export variety and import variety respectively account for 10.41% and 1.57% of the variation in Canadian provincial productivity differences, and the net trade variety related effects account for 7.06%. Furthermore, the export and import variety respectively account for 9.92% and 6.95% of within-province productivity growth, and their total effects can account for 17.31%. Evaluated at the sample mean, a 10% increase in all trade varieties leads to a 0.90% increase in Canadian productivity, in which the export variety's contribution is 0.57% and the import variety's is 0.33%.

This volume is a tribute to Professor Hal Hill, one of the most distinguished and internationally renowned Australian development economists and the single most important Australian figure in the networks that bind the Australian and Southeast Asian economics professions over the past four decades. The volume contains twelve original contributions by distinguished scholars who are at the forefront of their own subject areas. The contributions are thematically arranged into three parts to reflect Professor Hill’s wide-ranging research interests: trade policy issues central to the development policy debate, structural change and global economic integration in East Asian economies, and the political economy of development policy.