Content area
Full Text
The Pacific Rim is bursting. Investment and export opportunities are expanding rapidly as the Pacific Rim's increasingly borderless economy is characterized by high growth rates and a freer and freer flow of goods, information, money and people.
The increased presence of multinational corporations, growing political and economic cooperation among Pacific Rim countries, and infusion of capital to build the Pacific Rim infrastructure, are signs of its enlarging and inevitable growth in the world marketplace.
The United States now does more business across the Pacific than the Atlantic, according to the Center for the New West, a Denver-based economic and business research and consulting organization. Not surprisingly, eight of the top 10 seaports handling container cargo were located in the Pacific, and its airports handled nearly 50 percent of all air cargo among top 20 international airports, with increases expected.
The Pacific Rim is buying. Taiwan, which has imports growing at a faster pace than exports for the first time since 1980, now gives preference to United States goods (U.S. exports were up by 40 percent in 1988); Singapore has few trade restrictions. And the U.S. leads foreign suppliers in sales of information technology -- growing at 120 percent; U.S. electronic firms are making significant inroads into Japan's tight market, and U.S. computer software is projected to jump 25 percent each year for the next decade.
"There is incredible room for economic growth in the Pacific Rim," says Chris Mead, president of Mead Ventures, a Phoenix publisher of information on international business, chiefly of the Pacific Rim. "Hong Kong's and Singapore's per capita income will double over the next five to 10 years. Korea's, Taiwan's and Malaysia's income will double in U.S. dollars."
The Pacific Rim's several dozen nations hold more than 2 billion people with a combined region output exceeding $3.4 trillion -- and growing at a rate of $3 billion a week, noted Bob Wurmstedt, director of communications at the Center for the New West in Denver.
He says the European Economic Community, in comparison, has 12 nations and more than 320 million people with combined GNP exceeding $4 trillion; the U.S. has 248 million people and a $5.1 trillion GNP.