Responses to Regionalism in East Asia - Japanese Production Networks in the Automotive Sector (Electronic book text)

Regionalism has emerged as a defining feature of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century international political economy, and in East Asia this political process may be seen as a response to continuing globalization, the Asian financial crisis, and the deepening regionalization of economic activity. This interaction between regionalism and regionalization, between private and state actors, is a key dynamic of the East Asian political economy today. Taken together these forces amount to a transformation of the regional political economy which, this book suggests, necessitates a re-evaluation of the way in which we can examine the activities of the multinational enterprise in East Asia. The central question of this study, then, is to what extent has this transformation impacted on the strategies employed by Japanese multinationals in their East Asian operations. Drawing on recent empirical data, this book explores how these firms have responded to regionalism.