Southeast Asia, with a total population of 520 million, remains a region characterized by fragmentation, diversity, and considerable internal conflict despite the unifying influence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), formed some thirty-five years ago. In the new millennium, it has lost the distinction of being one of the world’s faster growing group of economies since the 1997 financial crisis. While it has benefited from the winds of globalization, it has now to cope with the painful adjustments to problems that stem from the inadequacies of good governance and structural changes. This volume brings together the combined insights of specialists who have worked and lived in the region. The theme of the book is change and transformation. The authors identify the trends and forces that propel the region along, and then bring in discussions on key issues. In some cases, they offer their views on the future of the region and recommendations for solutions. The intention of the book is to offer a scholarly review of the region’s development over the past half century and to provide a firm basis for forecasting its further evolution in the new millennium.

Asian countries are catching up with the West by transforming their primarily agrarian societies into industrial powerhouses. Manufacturing is driving innovation, productivity growth, and higher standards of living for billions of Asians. In the colonial past, the Asian production and supply chains served Western consumers. The world is now poised to evolve, led by a unified Asian business landscape capable of driving sustainable global growth within industries and markets. The Global Rise of Asian Transformation provides insights into the complex process of macro-political and economic dynamics reshaping the business landscape throughout Asia. This edited collection lays bare the megatrends that are challenging the region, including emerging consumers, urbanization, infrastructure, climate change, and energy megatrends that will further bolster the region's world standing if governments and businesses handle them adeptly. Case studies of major international companies, such as Sony, Lenovo, and Tata Motors, are also included.

From the re-emergence of Japan as an industrial power in the 1950s through to the contemporary rise of China as a potential economic and political behemoth, the story of East Asian development has been central to any serious analysis of the dynamics and trajectory of the global political economy. Integrated into a coherent, critical narrative, this book examines key political-economic and social dynamics that helped forge the ‘miracle’ economies of East Asia and continue to drive them forward in the volatile circumstances of our current epoch. It analyses the relation between the state and markets; the changing nature of economic governance and its relation to inequality; and the rise of China and its international consequences. Historically informed and comparative in nature, the book contributes to the analysis of the transformations of Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and China, and is the first to cover the ground in one volume. Written by a leading analyst of East Asian development, the book engages with the relevant issues and debates, in an open, non-technical language, making it useful as an advanced textbook not only for East Asian studies, but more generally in international political economy and development studies.

The environment is one of the defining issues of our times, and it is closely linked to questions and dilemmas surrounding economic development. Southeast Asia is one of the world’s most economically and demographically dynamic regions, and it is also one in which a host of environmental issues raise themselves. The Routledge Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia is a collection of 30 chapters dealing with the most significant scholarly debates in this rapidly growing field of study. Structured in four main parts, it gives a comprehensive regional overview of, and insight into, the environment in Southeast Asia. Wide-ranging and balanced, this handbook promotes scholarly understanding of how environmental issues are dealt with from diverse theoretical perspectives. It offers a detailed empirical understanding of the myriad environmental problems and challenges faced in Southeast Asia. This is the first publication of its kind in this field; a helpful companion for a global audience and for scholars of Southeast Asian studies from a variety of disciplines.

This book examines the uneven economy in Asia, showing how the pace of economic transformation affects prosperity and the emerging middle class. Using the Lewis turning point and the long run cycle of the rise and fall of nations as a framework, it demonstrates how demographic trends, digitization rates and consumer preferences creates business opportunities in a disruptive and uncertain world. This includes moves toward promoting Eurasian integration, restructuring of state-owned enterprises, green economy, and the digital economies – ecommerce, fintech and sharing economy. Vanity capital, longevity and leisure economies are also discussed. The author explains what drives creative disruption, technical innovation and their effect on manufacturing, consumers, businesses, and sustainability. It is essential reading for students, academics, executives, and business persons wanting in-depth coverage of the economic landscape in Asia.

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. ‘Exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The Companion to Global Environmental History offers multiple points of entry into the history and historiography of this dynamic and fast-growing field, to provide an essential road map to past developments, current controversies, and future developments for specialists and newcomers alike. Combines temporal, geographic, thematic and contextual approaches from prehistory to the present day Explores environmental thought and action around the world, to give readers a cultural, intellectual and political context for engagement with the environment in modern times Brings together environmental historians from around the world, including scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and China

An examination of how Chinese family and business networks have been closely interlocked with economic and social structures, around which government and states developed.