00074918.2013.850643

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

Asia Rising: Growth and Resilience in an Uncertain

Global Economy

Thee Kian Wie

To cite this article: Thee Kian Wie (2013) Asia Rising: Growth and Resilience in an

Uncertain Global Economy, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 49:3, 397-398, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2013.850643

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.850643

Published online: 05 Dec 2013.

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Book reviews 397

moves. Readers should be aware of not just the miracle of East Asian economic

integration but also its dificulties.

Shuhei Nishitateno Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Tokyo

Hal Hill and Maria Socorro Gochoco-Bautista (eds) (2013) Asia Rising: Growth and Resilience in an Uncertain Global Economy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham,

and the Asian Development Bank, Manila, pp. xvi + 424. Cloth: £99.00.

Asia – particularly East Asia – has experienced rapid economic growth since the

1980s and has overcome several inancial crises, including the 1997–98 Asian inancial crisis and the 2008–09 global inancial crisis (GFC). The ability of Asian

countries to sustain growth and eradicate poverty requires continued productive investment in physical and human capital as well as in physical infrastructure. This voluminous book, edited by two eminent economists, one from The Aus-tralian National University and the other from the University of the Philippines, presents a comprehensive discourse on Asia’s past and prospective economic per-formance and considers how best to sustain the region’s prosperity in the face of depressed aggregate demand from the West.

The GFC, which started in the US, in late 2008, reshaped the global economy

and redeined Asia’s role within it. World economic growth slowed, but Asia’s

largest emerging economies (that is, China, India and Indonesia) continued to thrive. This uneven growth not only enhanced East Asia’s already increasing prominence but also raised important questions, such as how to maintain the region’s momentum; how to remove existing bottlenecks to growth (such as inad-equate levels of physical infrastructure); how to ease international commercial tensions caused by the reluctance of China, in particular, to appreciate its

cur-rency; how to strengthen inancial development and regulation, to guard against inancial malpractice; and how to develop high-quality institutions that underpin

and sustain economic transformation.

The book comprises three parts. The irst provides an overview by the edi

-tors on the dificulties of sustaining Asia’s growth and prosperity in an increas -ingly uncertain global economy. The second discusses the various development challenges facing Asia’s emerging economies, such as those of institutions and governance, infrastructure, productivity and capital accumulation, savings and

investment, inance, and the various investment treaties signed in ASEAN. The

third provides various country studies, including of Asia’s two largest emerging economies, China and India, and the four largest ASEAN countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

The book’s discussion of China and India is of particular interest, because never in world economic history have such large countries, with a combined population of around 2.5 billion, grown so rapidly for so long – China since the late 1970s and India since the early 1990s. The rise of these two Asian giants has also raised

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398 Book reviews

questions about whether their momentum can be sustained in the coming years; the Chinese government has already lowered its estimate of economic growth from the steady 9%–10% of the past three decades to 7.5% this year. And while India has grown faster than Indonesia during the past two decades, last year the

trend was reversed for the irst time.

The discussion of the four large Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malay-sia, the Philippines and Thailand – is also of interest. Of the four, only Thailand has experienced uneven growth in recent years, owing to the protracted political unrest in the country after the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra by the military. In general, however, the relatively good economic performance of these

countries is due to sound economic policies, as relected by their low rates of inla

-tion and low budget deicits, and the iscal sustainability of their governments, as relected by the steady decline in their ratios of public debt to GDP.

The authors do not discuss the adverse environmental impact of the rapid growth of these countries, which is a pity; China, India and Indonesia are, in descending order, the three largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Asia, accord-ing to the OECD. Despite this minor stricture, the editors are to be commended

for producing such a ine book, which should be recommended reading for

Asia-focused economics lecturers and their students.

Thee Kian Wie Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta

Gavin W. Jones, Terence H. Hull and Maznah Mohamad (eds) (2011) Changing Marriage Patterns in Southeast Asia: Economic and Socio-cultural Dimensions, Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia

Series, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. xii + 239. Cloth: £95.00.

This edited collection examines partnership and marriage patterns in their

eco-nomic, social and cultural contexts in the Malay world (the ethno-linguistic dei

-nition), or in archipelagic Southeast Asia (the geographic deinition). It comprises

quantitative and qualitative contributions from demographers, sociologists and anthropologists – one of whom is also an insider: Setiawati Intan Savitri, the co-author of chapter 5, ‘Politics and marriage among Islamic activists in Indonesia’. She is herself a Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party) activist.

Southeast Asia is far from homogenous, so its inherent cultural and economic

diversity makes broad assessments dificult. Indonesia and Malaysia, for exam -ple, are predominantly Muslim; the Philippines predominantly Catholic. Sin-gapore and Malaysia, in particular, have large Chinese and Indian populations, while Indonesia has a huge number of different ethnic and sub-ethnic groups. A small country, Singapore is one of the world’s richest countries; Indonesia has the world’s fourth-largest population but much lower income per capita than Singa-pore. In response, the book combines introductory quantitative analyses of trends in marriage and teenage marriage, which give a broad picture of partnership

patterns in the region, with country-speciic ield studies of smaller samples in