Urban Economic Development and Globalisation Linkages in the Pacific Rim

Increasingly it is city regions that are the ʼnexus of the new global economy and society’ as the barriers between nations are being eroded and the control of governments over the flow of capital, technology and innovation is reduced. Nowhere are the dynamics of the interplay of the forces of globalisation and the roles of cities as engines of economic growth more dramatic than in the Pacific Rim region and its rapidly emerging mega-cities and extended metropolitan regions. There has been a plethora of literature dealing with globalisation and the new global economy. An outcome of the processes described above is the rise of ʼnew global geographies’, of borderless geographies with quite different breaks and boundaries from the past. Increasingly, decisions on manufacturing location by multi-national firms are based on comparison of labour costs and other key factors of production across a range of potential host countries.