An economic profile of the Pacific Rim

James V. Koch, in Business Horizons (March 1989), explains that it is now ..... to talk of the Asian economic miracle, a phenomenon that has provided certain countries with the highest real rates of economic growth and the most rapidly rising per capita incomes in the world.

The beneficiaries of this miracle are only part of a larger, economically ..... area known as the Pacific Rim, and the World Bank predicts that the Pacific Rim will be the fastest growing region in the world over the next five years, averaging a real growth rate of 4.3 percent annually compared to an average of only 3.5 percent for all industrialized nations.

The Pacific Rim ..... a group of extremely diverse countries that are united by their common access to the Pacific Ocean and their export-oriented economies.

The United States and Japan dominate the Pacific Rim from an economic standpoint, while the economically immature People's Republic of China, by ..... of its more than one billion citizens, is a force of growing importance.

Together, these three countries constitute the economic giants of the region; by comparison, the remainder of the countries of the Pacific Rim are economic ......

Others in the region, the ASEAN group (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore), generally exhibit lower levels of per capita GDP than the NICs (Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan) but are more fully ..... economically and have had high rates of economic growth in recent years.

The British Commonwealth nations of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are prosperous in terms of their per capita incomes, although they have exhibited only ..... rates of economic growth in recent years.

The so-called 'Island Countries', such as Fiji, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu, exhibit traditional native ..... economies that are small in size and seldom based upon organized markets.

Finally, the considerable physical presence of the Soviet Union, Southeast Asian states such as Vietnam, and Spanish-speaking Central and South American countries such as Mexico and Peru ..... their relatively insignificant economic role in the area to date.

There are surprisingly few common ..... among the countries on the Pacific Rim; they are exceedingly diverse ethnically, politically, socially, religiously, and geographically.