ABSTRACT
From the 1980s onwards, and especially in the early and mid-1990s, there has been growing international recognition of the sustained rapid economic growth, structural change and industrialisation of the East Asian region. There has also been a tendency to see East Asia as much more of an economically integrated region than it actually is, and a corresponding tendency to see economic progress in the region as being similar in origin and nature. Terms such as the ‘Far East’, ‘Asia-Pacific’, ‘Pacific Asia’, ‘East Asia’, ‘yen bloc’, ‘flying geese’, ‘tigers’, ‘minidragons’, and so on, have tended to encourage this perception of the region as far more economically integrated and similar than it actually is.
