The Global Recession: Its Impact in Asia and the Pacific

The relationship between local economic development and the global economy is a dynamic process that differs in space and time and from country to country. Nowhere are these differences more evident than within the Asian and Pacific region—a region of contrasts. It is a region that contains nine of the so called ‘least developed’ countries and more than 50 per cent of the world's poor. It hosts Japan, which emerged as a major economic power in the 1960s and 1970s, to be followed a short time later by the ‘tiger’ economies of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. More recently, the region's development has been dominated by the emerging global powers of China, India and Brazil. The contrasting characteristics and performance of these nations becomes even more graphic when the focus centres on the metropolitan cities of the region, including Mumbai, Shanghai, Apia, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, Santiago and Auckland (Shirley, 2008).