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This study provides an appraisal of Vietnam's regionalist integration strategy of trade liberalization. Trade liberalization through participation in regional free trade agreement (FTAs), such as the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and the planned ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA), have also provided Vietnam with useful lessons and experience to succeed in its domestic economic reforms. Using computable general equilibrium models, the quantitative impact of different configurations of regional free trade areas on Vietnam is made. The results indicate thatfurther participation in the expansion of FTAs beyond AFTA could bring greater economic advantage and lower adjustment costsfor Vietnam's efforts in industrialization andfostering structural economic change.

This paper scrutinises the potential economic impact of Chinese (PRC) and Indian tourists on the ASEAN economies. A specific case‐study of Singapore is conducted. Econometric techniques are employed to forecast the visitor‐expenditure of the Chinese (PRC) and Indian tourists. Based on the forecasted value, the input‐output methodology is used to evaluate the potential contribution of Chinese and Indian tourists to the Singapore economy. The overall assessment is favourable. Chinese and Indian tourists are expected to contribute significantly more to the employment and output of Singapore in the medium term. It is likely the results obtained from the Singapore case‐study could be reproduced for the other ASEAN nations.

The chapter considers the application of modern concepts of development as in competitive advantage, value chain, cluster analysis and agglomeration economies, applied assiduously to foster growth in the Singapore’s economy. Economic development in the Singapore’s economy is divided into different phases. The roles and usage of the new concepts in charting plans and policies that transform a former British colony and trading post into a modern industrialized economy with world class infrastructure and sophisticated enterprises are discussed in profiling the different phases of development.

The chapter provides a concise review of the major theoretical contribution to economic development since the Second World War. Backed by the Harrod–Domar growth model, economic development strategies in the 1940s till 1960s were much dominated by the debate between balanced growth championed by Ragnar Nurse and Rodenstein-Rodan and unbalanced growth led by Albert Hirschman. Unbalanced growth doctrine favors using the limited resources to develop identified strategic sector which will then pull and push other sectors to support and achieve overall growth. The unbalanced growth approach somewhat jived with theories based on economic dualism associated with researchers like Arthur Lewis, John Fei and Gustav Ranis. The basic dual economy theory explains how an agrarian economy with no modern industrial sector is transformed into a mature industrial economy. The idea of development as transformation from primitive traditional society to one characterized by high mass consumption was skillfully described by Rostow’s book in 1961. By the end of the 1980s, new theories that have substantive impact on economic development were propounded by academics and researchers in field of business strategies, urban planning and spatial economics. Many of these have neoclassical economics foundation and also have derived insights from increased spatial interdependence and competition attributed to globalization and availability of new communication technologies. New concepts like competitive advantage, agglomeration economies and global value chain become increasingly familiar in development economics.

This study examines the growth experience of the ASEAN and East Asian countries from a neoclassical perspective. Using data from 1960-94 for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan, the neoclassical proposition of conditional convergence was evaluated. The speed of convergence of ASEAN and East Asian countries to their respective steady state levels of per capita GDP, conditional on the initial endowment of the physical and human capital, is estimated at 4.8 per cent per year. This result indicates that, were the poor countries of the ASEAN community to attain levels of physical and human capital investment, rates of savings, productivity growth, and population growth similar to those of the rich countries, per capita incomes in the former would grow significantly faster than those in the latter 1. Introduction Will the developing countries eventually catch up with the income levels of the industrialized economies? What can the poor countries do to join the ranks of the high income economies? How can growth be sustained? Many economists have studied such issues, and this study focuses on the dynamic Asia-Pacific region. In particular, it seeks to examine the growth experience of the ASEAN and East Asian economies' from a neoclassical perspective. This study considers the growth experience of these economies in the 1960-90 period as a transitional process of economic development due to changes in both comparative and competitive advantage. We examine whether the poorer economies are catching up with the rich economies in the region, thereby showing signs of conditional convergence in their income levels. The presence or absence of growth convergence will undoubtedly provide policy implications with respect to the role of technology, education and government in economic development. The article is organized as follows. In section 2, the theoretical background is briefly reviewed and the definitions of convergence are stated. It will also include a review of empirical works done recently on the subject. An overview of the ASEAN and East Asian growth experience is provided in section 3. Beginning with a preliminary investigation on convergence among nine economies, section 4 follows the Barro and Sala-i-Martin approach in modelling and testing the existence of conditional convergence. Section 5 explores the policy implication of the findings and concludes the article. 2. The Neoclassical Growth Model2 Robert Solow (1956) and Swan (1956) provided the most basic version of the neoclassical theory of growth. The neoclassical model emphasizes how growth arises from the accumulation of capital. Starting from a linear homogenous production function, the capital stock per efficient labour unit, k, evolves according to: The neoclassical model implies that countries with similar production technologies, resource endowment, time preference of consumption as well as comparable saving and population growth rates should converge to similar steady state levels of per-capita income.' This convergence property means that poor countries starting with a relatively low standard of living and a lower capital/ labour ratio will grow faster during the transition as they catch up with the rich countries, but ultimately both groups will arrive at the same level of per capita income. The transition dynamics implied by equation 1 are plotted in Figure 1. The downward sloping curve depicts the rate of growth in the country's capital stock as a function of the capital per effective unit of labour, while the line parallel to the horizontal axis shows the growth rate of the effective labour force.' The vertical differences () between the two curves show the growth rates of the k or a constant multiple of the growth rates y. Figure 1 illustrates two economies with the same steady state, k*. The further it is from the steady state, k*, the higher is the growth rate of k in the transitional period. …