ABSTRACT
More than 1.5 billion people, about 38 per cent of the population of Asia or 22 per cent of the world’s population, live in geographic East Asia. The region is one of the world’s most densely inhabited places, with 133 inhabitants per square km (340 per square mile), being about three times the world average of 45 per square km (120 per square mile). East Asia is the home of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter referred to as China), the second largest economy in the world, and three of the four formerly-named ‘Little Tigers’, namely, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea and Taiwan (see chapter 2). With a sustained high single- to double-digit economic growth and development in recent decades (CIA World Factbook, 2010), the region is increasingly playing the role of a global growth-pole and is fast emerging as a manufacturing and information technology hub of the world economy.
