ABSTRACT
China's population is almost twice that of the rest of East and Southeast Asia, and Japan's gross domestic product (GDP) is almost twice the sum of the combined GDPs of the rest of East Asia. The sheer size of China's population sometimes leads people to expect that its market is very large and its resources are very rich—in other words, to believe that China might be the world's last remaining economic frontier. Rapid economic growth in the Pacific basin has attracted the attention of both economists and politicians. Japanese-East Asian interdependence must be recognized as potentially more important and beneficial for Japan than East Asia as the economies of the latter grow. This holds true to a lesser extent for relations between other industrialized Pacific basin nations and East Asia. There are serious problems in certain Association of South East Asian Nations states, such as the existence of social frustrations arising from unemployment, poverty, income inequality, and political instability.
