Introduction

Abstract

In the past twenty years, the Asia-Pacific region, with China and India at its core, has emerged as the growing center of the world economy and as the new commercial and industrial powerhouse of the international system. For its part, the West, and particularly Europe, seems to have lost its economic, commercial and political centrality. In the past decade, owing to constant, sustained (and until 2010 double-digit) GDP-growth, China has become the second biggest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP, the center of the Asian production network, the leading exporting nation in the world, and the largest importer of crude oil and other liquid fuels.