erc/metu
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN ECONOMICS  IV
September 13-16, 2000, Ankara

Globalization, Regionalization and Trans-border Modes of Economic Growth in East Asia

Ngai-Ling Sum (University of Manchester, UK)

Abstract

Globalization has attracted increased academic interest. Among the many competing conceptions that exist, some scholars examine it in uni-scalar terms as a globalized ‘space of flows’ involving production, finance, trade, and culture. Others are more sensitive to the multi-scalar nature of globalization. In this regard, some adopt ‘state-centred’ accounts that focus on the role of the national state in globalization; and others have privileged supranational regional blocs as their starting points (e.g., EU, NAFTA, and APEC). These contrasting scalar accounts are interesting and important contributions to the discussions; but they still run the risk of neglecting the interwining of activities on different scales and their spatio-temporal interlinkages/rearticulations that are involved in the remaking of capitalisms. This paper seeks to develop a multi-scalar approach that moves progressively from the abstract to the concrete in three steps. Thus the first part of the paper explores the dialectical coexistence of diverging and converging trends of globalization and regionalization. At different conjunctures, different trend dominate. The domination of one particular trend can be analyzed in terms of the opportunities and constraints that are created in and through the processes of de- and re-territorialization at specific conjunctures. Between the 1980s and the 1997 Asian Crisis, the de- and re-territorialization processes have promoted a general convergence between globalization and regionalization in East Asia. The second part of the paper then explores such convergence by examining the twin paths of regional-globalization and global-regionalization. The emergence of trans-border modes of growth (or ‘growth triangles’) can be understood in terms of the first path -- in which local-national-regional actors sought to reterritorialize/capture global flows of production and trade and fix them in trans-border spaces. The emerging trajectory of this path is explained by the dynamics of ‘embedded exportism’ as newly-industrializing East Asian economies (e.g., Hong Kong, Taiwan) sought to expand their time-space reach and tried to develop complex modes of economic coordination to achieve this. It is in this regard that I have developed in the third part of the paper the middle-range concept of ‘time-space governance’ to characterize the various economic and extra-economic mechanisms involved in such trans-border coordination and the tensions and crisis tendencies therein.

Economic Research Center
Middle East Technical University
06531 Ankara Turkey
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e-mail: metuerc@metu.edu.tr