A major force in East Asia's remarkable economic growth and industrial transformation, foreign direct investment has been growing at 14?15 percent annually in Southeast Asia and China over the last decade. This timely volume examines the impact of investment on trade in the region, focusing especially on microeconomic issues of strategy, activity, and behavior of corporate investors. The contributors explore the role of corporate alliances and networks of Japanese and Chinese firms, as well as the influence of investors from newly industrializing economies, in the relocation of production and trade within the region.

A major force in East Asia's remarkable economic growth and industrial transformation, foreign direct investment has been growing at 14–15 percent annually in Southeast Asia and China over the last decade. This timely volume examines the impact of investment on trade in the region, focusing especially on microeconomic issues of strategy, activity, and behavior of corporate investors. The contributors explore the role of corporate alliances and networks of Japanese and Chinese firms, as well as the influence of investors from newly industrializing economies, in the relocation of production and trade within the region.

This volume appears at a time when there is tremendous interest in direct investment of one country in the industry of another. It brings together papers by leading economists from North America, Australia and Asia, and provides an excellent introduction to this currently important economic issue. The contributions include original and comprehensive surveys of experience with, and policies towards, direct foreign investment in the Asian-Pacific region. Of particular interest are the discussion of investment within and from Japan and the synthesis of studies on North America, Australia, and the developing Asian countries. The book is a valuable guide for policy-makers and businessmen, and should serve as an essential text for students of foreign investment. General readers will find answers here to many questions on the economics of countries which encourage foreign investment or invest considerably outside their own shores.

Multinational Corporations and the Emerging Network Economy in Asia and the Pacific delves into the ongoing rise of a global economy anchored in a web of inter-firm production networks and the role played by multinational corporations in the process. It considers the strategies and business models corporations have adopted lately to face today’s highly competitive global markets, especially outsourcing and offshoring, focusing on the modalities observed in Asia Pacific and the Pacific Rim at large. Since their inception, corporations have undergone a series of fundamental changes; each has corresponded to a given era of industrial development and has given rise to a particular type of government policy response. The book addresses these timely issues and other such as the transformation of global production networks into global innovation networks, the link between corporate and national innovation strategies and movement up the global production value chain, and the fragmentation of production and the resulting increase in component and sub-assembly trade in the region. It also takes up the emergence of multinational corporations from developing countries and the efforts aimed at forging basic rules of corporate social responsibility and developing sound institutions for building a working framework of corporate governance in the Pacific. Written by some of the region’s most eminent and influential economists and political scientists, this volume will appeal to students and scholars working in the field of Asia Pacific studies as well as to businesspersons and policymakers taking decisions in the region.

This study examines issues such as the sectors that had attracted foreign direct (FDI), potential sectors for FDI inflows, the countries and the types of corporations from which FDI had originated, and global FDI flows, taking into account the experiences of the Association of South Asian newly industrializing economies and some countries of the Association of South East Asian nations. The study analyses sectoral flows of FDI to identify the underlying forces determining such flows and looks at policies pursued by several countyries in the region.

This book aims to produce a monograph evaluating the extent to which direct foreign investment in developing countries is related to structural change in the Asia-Pacific region. It is useful for economists, public policymakers, graduates or undergraduates.