Abstract
The concept ‘interdependence’ can be traced back to the 19th century, while it did not come into the literature of the economic analysis of interactions and inter-relations among countries and regions until the Second World War.1 In the 1970s and the 1980s, a large number of papers, books and reports had been conducted on the topics of the categories, structures, and measures for interdependence and the macro-economic policy and coordination between the increasingly interdependent industrial economies.2 The general phenomena of interdependence, fostered by international and inter-regional events and developments, of course, have produced and are still producing tremendous increases in terms of flows of information, technology, capital, people, and cultural influences across political borders, which, therefore, witnesses the most evident in the economic performances of border-regions. In addition to three basic propositions which are focused on the spatial aspects of economic interdependence with respect to distance, size, and border dimension (i.e., the number of independent authorities involved in a border-region) respectively in this chapter, we try to explore some empirical evidences for border-regional economics which, under certain conditions, may be transformed from the status of border-separated economics to that of borderless economics.
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References
For more discussions, see Zhang Yunling (1989): The Interdependence in the World’s Economies, p. 2, Beijing: The Economic Science Press.
See, for example, H. R. Alker (1974): “Analysing Global Interdependence”, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; G. Oudis and J. Sachs (1984): “Macroeconomic Co-ordination among the Industrial Economies”, Brookings Paper, No. 1.
Both Eichengreen et al. and Frankel et al. used a similar log-form specification as ln(1+TRADE D )= ß0+ 13 1 1n(GNP.GNP J )+ 13. 2 1n([GNP/POP r ]• [GNP/POP J ])+ [3 3 DIST D +ß 4 CONT +u where TRADE D is the nominal value of bilateral trade between countries i and j,GNP 1 •GNP J is the product of the two countries’ nominal national incomes, [GNP/POP r [GNP/POP J is the product of the two countries’ per capita national incomes (also in nominal terms), DIST D is the distance between the economic centers of gravity of the two countries (measured in miles or kilometers), and CONT is a dummy variable for whether the two countries are contiguous. More details may be found in J. Frankel, S.-J. Wei and E. Stein (1994): “APEC and Regional Economic Agreements in the Pacific”, unpublished manuscript, University of California at Berkeley, USA; B. Eichengreen and D. A. Irwin (1995); “Trade Blocs, Currency Blocs and the Reorientation of World Trade in the 1930s”, Journal of International Economics, Vol. 38, pp. 1–24.
This phenomenon may be plausibly explained by the increasing tendency of regional integration among the neighbouring countries (such as EC, NAFTA, ASEAN, etc.) in the recent decades.
This household investigation was made in collaboration with the Research Office of the Magistrate, Fengxian county. I also benefited from the students of Class-788-SM of CUMT School of Economics and Trade for the data collection in 1990.
Data source: The World Yearbook of Economic Statistics, 1983–84. The 27 countries include USA, Japan, Germany (W), France, UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Canada, Australia, Austria, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Egypt, Libya, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.
Notice that the calculation of NMM for each country is subject to the following criteria: if the reserves of a metal equal to zero, are less than 0.5 million metric tons of content, or even not available in a country, the metal will then be excluded from the total number of the major metals (i.e., 15) of the country.
Data source: World Resources 1992–93, pp. 262–3 and pp. 322–3, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. The 93 countries include (1) AFRICA: Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zaire, Zimbabwe; (2) NORTH and CENTRAL AMERICA: Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Rep., Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, USA; (3) SOUTH AMERICA: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Surinname; (4) ASIA: China, Cyprus, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, Yemen; (5) EUROPE: Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, UK, Yugoslavia; (6) FORMER USSR; and (7) OCEANIA: Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands.
According to the principle of macro-economics, the import (M) and export (X) in an open economy ought to follow an equilibrium equation: W+S+T+X=C+I+G+M (where, W=wage, C=consumption, S=save, T=tax, I=investment, G=government expenditure).
For example, in a semi-farming and semi-herding area, Fuchun, Inner Mongolia, China, more than two-thirds of the Han-Chinese and Mongolian have established relations through marriages. (See Pan Naigu and Ma Rong (eds.): Papers on the Frontier Areas Development, pp. 110–20, Beijing: Peking University Press, 1993.)
Israel—PLO (1995): “Agreement on Establishing the Palestinian Self-Rule in Most of the West Bank”, signed in Washington D. C., USA, September 28.
The Economists, p. 17, September 30, 1995.
According to Financial Times (p. 4, September 29, 1995), 51 per cent of Israelis backed the 1995 Agreement and throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip support for Mr Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, personally increased to 54 per cent after the agreement was signed, up from 49 per cent in July, 1995.
More detailed analyses may be found in J. T. Peach (1985): “Income Distribution in the U.S.—Mexico Borderlands”, in L. J. Gibson and A. C. Renteria (eds.): The U.S. and Mexico: Borderland Development and the National Economies, p. 57–80, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985.
E. Pond (1990): After the Wall: American Policy Toward Germany, A 20th Century Fund Paper, New York: Priority Press Publication.
A brief history of East-West German unification is as below: (1) November 9, 1989, the crossing points from East to West Germany were opened without restriction; (2) July 1990, the two German economies were unified with the introduction of the single DM currency; (3) October 3, 1990, political unification was confirmed when GDR (German Democratic Republic) officially acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany in accordance with Article 23 of the Basic Law.
For more details about this zone, see T. Wild and P. N. Jones (1993): “From Periphery to New Centrality? The Transformation of Germany’s Zonenrandgebiet”, Geography, Vol. 78, pp. 281–94. P. N. Jones and T. Wild (1994): “Opening the Frontier: Recent Spatial Impacts in the Former Inner-German Border Zone”, Regional Studies,Vol. 28, pp. 259–73.
J. Dempsy (1995): “Berliners Pay Prices for Wall around Utilities”, Financial Times, p. 3, September 6.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Guo, R. (1996). In Search for Economics. In: Border-Regional Economics. Contributions to Economics. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-11268-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-11268-7_5
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