Industrialisation, De-industrialisation and Uneven Development: The Case of the Pacific Rim

Abstract

The national economies comprising the Asia-Pacific or Pacific Rim region present a bewildering diversity of cultures, individual histories and current levels of development. They also form an increasingly articulated and significant global economic region; ‘significant’ in the sense that developments within this region influence and reflect the structural forces and transformations under way in the developed industrialised countries (DICs), the so-called capitalist ‘core’ or ‘centre’. With the emergence of the Pacific Rim, earlier theories based on simple core-periphery dichotomies appear increasingly inadequate as explanations of the pattern and dynamics of uneven development in the world economy.

The Pacific Basin region contains a number of countries that have experienced some of the highest rates of economic growth in the world in recent decades: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also contains five of the world’s largest food producers: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand and the USA; and it accounts for large proportions of the capitalist world’s production of key minerals: 49 percent of copper, 54 percent of lead, 60 percent of iron ore, 69 percent of tin and 80 percent of nickel. About half the exports and imports are traded within it, and as much as one third of all transnational [corporate] investment in the world is located there. [Crough and Wheelwright 1982, p. 34]