Pacific Rim Agriculture and Trade: Toward the Twenty-First Century

While institutional and political changes in Europe are grabbing the headlines, the steady growth of Pacific Rim economies and their increasing role in world trade are transforming the region and ensuring its economic leadership in the twenty-first century. Over recent decades, the Pacific has shown a vitality and dynamism surpassing that of other regions. Economic growth and trade are defining characteristics that bind together this region of disparate countries and that "have brought about a shift in the world's political and economic center of gravity" (Linder, 1986, p. 1) away from the Atlantic. Exemplifying the region's extraordinary role in trade, Hong Kong, a tiny city-state, exports more manufactured products than the Soviet Union and East Europe combined (Copper, 1990, p. 483).