Asia's New Institutional Architecture: Evolving Structures for Managing Trade, Financial, and Security Relations (The Political Economy of the Asia Pacific)

How effective are regional and interregional institutions in managing Asia?s increasingly complex economic and security ties? This question is currently the subject of intense debate among both academics and policymakers. Based on an innovative approach to analyzing institutional design, this path-breaking book provides a rich theoretical and empirical analysis of trends in Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia. In particular, it shows how three major shocks?the end of the Cold War, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 9/11 attacks?have challenged Asia?s long-standing trade and security order and generated a new set of institutional structures for coping with regional dynamics. Whereas the original postwar trade and security order revolved around bilateral alliance structures, global economic and security institutions, and long-standing corporate and ethnic networks, the new institutional environment in Asia is manifested by the proliferation of preferential trading arrangements and security dialogues, both official and unofficial, formal and informal, bilateral and minilateral. Asia?s New Institutional Architecture brings together a multinational group of specialists on Asian trade and security to provide a theoretically grounded analysis of historical and current developments in the region. The book will be must reading for those interested in examining future trends for Asia and its relations with the world.