During the second half of the 20th century, a new "power center" of the world economy emerged in the Asia-Pacific region. Currently, the region accounts for more than 50% of global GDP production and more than 40% of world trade turnover. The significant role of the Asia-Pacific region in the world economy is associated not only with the presence of a number of developed countries (including such economic giants as the United States and Japan), but also with the rapid economic growth in Asian developing countries that took place in the 60s and 90s of the past century. The "four" new industrial countries (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) have already reached the economic indicators of developed countries. Until the 1997-1998 financial crisis, Southeast Asian countries also developed at a consistently high rate, and some of them (Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia) began to be called the "second wave"NIS. In the 1980s and 1990s, after the start of market reforms, the economic development of China and Vietnam accelerated dramatically.
In all these countries, external economic factors make a significant contribution to economic growth. The economic development of the "first wave" NIS in the 1960s and 1970s was largely based on the occupation of labor-intensive branches of their manufacturing industry in commodity "niches" on international markets, which were vacated by developed countries during the structural adjustment of their economies. In turn, as incomes grew and technological and financial potential accumulated in the NIS themselves, they began to pass the baton of labor-intensive export specialization to the economically less developed countries of Southeast Asia, and then to the newly "opening" economies of China and Indochina. As a result, trade and investment relations in the Asian part of the Asia-Pacific region sharply intensified in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, to date, the region has developed a kind of multi-tiered economic structure, on di ...
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