Introduction

From the 1980s, and especially in the early and mid-1990s, there was growing international recognition of the rapid economic growth, structural change and industrialisation of the East Asian region, including four economies of Southeast Asia, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. There was a tendency to see East Asia as a much more economically coherent region than it actually is, and a corresponding tendency to see economic progress in the region as similar in origin and nature. Terms such as the ‘Far East’, ‘Asia-Pacific’, ‘Pacific Asia’, ‘East Asia’, ‘Asian miracle’, ‘yen bloc’, ‘flying geese’, ‘tigers’, ‘mini-dragons’ and so on have tended to encourage this perception of the region as far more economically integrated and similar than it actually is.