Pacific Rim

The Pacific Rim is the name given to the countries located on the edges of the Pacific Ocean, and is a term generally associated with economic interaction among these countries. Together, they account for some 42 percent of the worlds population, and about 56 percent of the worlds gross domestic product (GDP), as well as about half of the trade in the entire world. The term Pacific Rim was coined in the early 1980s and used by Anthony H. Chisholm and Rodney Tyers in their book, Food Security: Theory, Policy, and Perspectives From Asia and the Pacific Rim. Four years later, David Aik-man followed up on the theme with Pacific Rim: Area of Change, Area of Opportunity.

Since ancient times, there were clearly interactions between the different parts of the Pacific as the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl was able to show in his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947. Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002) has also argued that the Chinese had managed to voyage to the Americas, an argument first propounded at length by John Ranking in Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez and Talameco in the Thirteenth Century by the Mongols (1827), although Ranking dates the contact as a century or so earlier than Menzies. From the 16th century, with the Spanish taking the Philippines and being involved in some of the Pacific islands, there were trade links across the Pacific with the Manila galleons and other ships regularly traversing the Pacific. Valparaiso in Chile was a port much concerned with this trans-Pacific trade for centuries. In World War II, there was much fighting in the Pacific, with the Southwest Pacific area being designated by the Allies. The mutual defense treaties, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Australia-New Zealand-United States Treaty (ANZUS), both encompassed the Pacific, with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) being founded in 1967 and coming to represent first a political and then a largely trade organization.

It was in the 1970s, when some of the countries around the Pacific started booming economically, that moves were made to increase trade across the Pacific to allow other countries to benefit from the new Asian “tiger” economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan (Republic of China). The emergence of China as a major economic power seeking close involvement in the Pacific and the end of communism in the Soviet Union (and indeed the end of the Soviet Union in 1991) helped encourage this sense of community in the Pacific Rim, which led to the formation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in 1989.

[Page 1262]The idea of bringing together the countries of the Pacific Rim was that there were vast natural resources in some of the countries: Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, the Pacific parts of Russia, and the United States. Australia, Chile, and the United States are also centers of agricultural production, as are New Zealand and Thailand; and the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan have great technological expertise, and China, Indonesia, and Mexico have vast human resources. Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (since 1997 a part of China) are centers of great entrepreneurial skills, and Japan and the United States have an aggressive capitalist outlook. Together, it was felt that these countries can contribute to their own prosperity and also the prosperity of other countries in the region.

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