Current Patterns of Trade and Investment

Abstract

Until recently, economic integration in East and South Asia were essentially separate processes. The closing decades of the 20th century saw the economies of East Asia increasingly integrated through expanding trade and investment linkages that were important both in the region’s impressive growth and in its rapid recovery from the deep economic crisis of 1997/98. South Asia presented a contrasting picture of slow and halting progress in economic integration, impeded by political conflicts and inward-looking economic policies. Trade and investment linkages between the two regions remained at a low level.