ABSTRACT
By the 1990s the next century had been predicted to be the ‘Pacific Century’ (Jones and Smith 2006: 225) and in 1993 the World Bank published a book entitled The East Asian Miracle and singled out the Asian ‘Tiger’ economies as models for long-term economic development. Aside from the immediate years after the East Asian Financial Crisis (1997–98), such perceptions have intensified and world leaders have variously referred to the current century as the ‘Asian Century’ or even the ‘China Century’ (Ryan 2012). There are many reasons for this. In 2004 the gross domestic product (GDP, in purchasing power parity—PPP) of East Asia and the Pacific, as defined by the World Bank, surpassed the GDP (PPP) of both the European Union (EU) and the USA (World Bank 2012). Then, in 2010 the People’s Republic of China became the world’s second largest economy when its Real GDP surpassed that of Japan. By 2010 total East Asian GDP (PPP) had also reached one-quarter of global GDP (PPP) (DFAT 2012).
