On Sun, 16 Jun 1996, Sanjay Marwah wrote:
> I was interested in getting suggestions on the future of economic
> cooperation between countries not included in the three major regional
> blocs of Europe, Japan and East Assia, and NAFTA. Specifically, I had in
> mind countries in the Indian Ocean rim including large countries like
> India, South Africa, and Australia.
First, I wonder if you are getting 'large size' from land are,
population, GDP, or ... well, precisely what? With one large population
and two medium - to - small population countries, India and Australia
substantially larger in land area than South Africa, it's a bit of a mix.
Of course, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that: looking
at a mixture of cases may help balance the discussion.
> Each of them seems somewhat left out of these large three blocs.
I would agree with India and sub-Saharan Africa seemingly being
left out of these emerging blocs. I found the paper in JWSR #1 on 'Life
Spaces' by Tieting Su quite useful for these, and from his arguments and
from looking at Australia's trade figures for the last thirty years, I'd
say that far from being left out of these blocs, Australia is part of the
overlap between the US-centered and East Asian - centered blocs. And this
is growing stronger, not weaker: as Australia's position generating
positive net exports with Japan has softened (in large part these
surpluses help finance negative net exports with the US -- to a modest
extent the US / Japanese trade imbalance is exageragated by looking at two
partners in a triangular trade relationship), trade with the Republic of
Korea has taken off. Indeed, currently the top eight trade partners of
Australia are Japan, the US, New Zealand, and Great Britain, among high
income countries, and the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China,
among middle and low income countries. And trade with GBR is in a
forty-year long slide in relative terms, So Australia does not look like
it is being left out of the trade bloc relationships. Of course, it
retains the advantage of not having much water per acre, which translates
into a lot more minerals per capita than a lot of countries enjoy.
> Is there any literature addressing the cooperation between middle
> range countries in trade and economic cooperation.
It seems to me that this is what the economic development
literature on regional economic cooperation focuses on. And, BTW, the
incorporation of CARICOM, CACM, the Andean Pact and the southern cone
group into NAFTA is by no means a done deal yet.
> ... Obviously, there can be no cut and dry answer to these
> scenarios, but the lack of attention to basic issues in
> political economy on how the post war environment changes
> for smaller and more long term powers is surprising.
I agree that its an important question. Of course,
there may be an impression that little is being done simply
because those who would like to know have not raised the
question, and those who are aware of what has been done have
not been discussing it in this forum. Since I consider myself
one of the former, I'm glad the issue was raised and look
forwward to hearing from the latter.
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au