Economic exchanges and sectoral and inter-city cooperation in Northeast Asia.

Northeast Asia with China, Japan and South Korea as the main components has drawn more and more attention worldwide. Many scholars have researched on the prospect of some alternatives of regional economic integration in Northeast Asia and/or Yellow Sea Rim as its core area. In this paper the authors start with an introduction of the major arguments embracing Yellow Sea Rim regionalism, and attempt to identify the dynamics challenging the proposed approaches of sub-regionalism of Northeast Asia. The paper firstly gives a brief review on the update development of bilateral economic exchanges, mainly Sino-Japanese and Sino-South Korean trades and direct investments with related contemporary issues. When the changing pattern of economic interactions is analyzed, special concerns are given to the possibility to realize the supposed potential of regional economic cooperation mainly based on economic complementarity among the related regions of China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. The authors then made their major efforts on putting forward possible approaches of multilateral cooperation of three countries in the near future, that is, deepened cooperation in selected sectors of industry and transportation and coordinated development among major cities. The authors stress that the development of sub-regional sectoral cooperation and the formation of interactive network of city-regions via social and economic interactions at local level are significant to the future regional integrated development in Northeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]