Economic Integration in East Asia beyond ASEAN6 and China - With a Special Emphasis on Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Viet Nam

초록

Since the second half of the 1980s, countries in Indochina and Myanmar (CLMV) have made significant initial progress in undertaking policy reforms toward market-oriented economies. And in the 1990s, they all joined with their advanced neighbors of ASEAN. Therefore, it seemed by mid-1990s that they were emulating the growth experience of other East Asian countries - from Japan down to second tier NIEs of ASEAN and China ？ especially by exercising the trade-investment interdependency mechanism. However, just as CLMV joined the flock, most of these aforementioned East Asian countries were directly and indirectly hurt by the so called the Asian economic crisis. CLMV were also negatively hit by the crisis initially, and economic conditions and prospects of these countries now are still quite blurry, except maybe for Vietnam. In this paper, I basically try to answer whether the so called the East Asian growth mechanism ？represented here by the ？trade-investment interdependency model？ ？ can be applied in explaining the growth of CLMV in the 1990s onwards. This is followed by some accounts on the limitations of this model when applying it to the case of CLMV. Finally, factors which must be considered before speculating future prospects for these countries are offered.