ABSTRACT
The diversity of countries with shores along the Pacific Rim should also be appreciated. Six developed countries qualify, with New Zealand and Japan entirely in the Pacific region, only the western parts of the USA and Canada, and the eastern parts of Russia and Australia. Twelve developing countries in Ask and twelve in Central and South America also border the Pacific. Of these, China is by far the largest in population. Of the thirty countries, only eight have experienced fairly continuous fast per capita economic growth since the mid-1960s: Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and parts of China. In the remaining developed countries growth has been slow but fairly steady, while in most of the Latin American countries it has been sporadic, with periods of actual decline. Fast economic growth has also been achieved by a number of countries bordering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the ‘rims’ of which have not caught on as geographical regions. Economically, the exceptionally fast growth on the Pacific Rim has largely been confined to countries in East and Southeast Asia, from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand in the south to Japan and South Korea in the north. Table 8.2 shows, however, that the largest industrial and financial companies outside Japan in the newly industrialising countries are mostly modest (refer also to Tables 4.7 and 4.9) and are based more on services than on manufacturing.
