동북아 경제권의 의의와 발전 방향 = The Prospects for the Development of Northeast Asian Economic Area

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The article describes historical efforts aiming at organizing multilateral framework of economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region, development and implications of APEC, and trends of regionalism such as NAFTA and AFTA. The future of emerging Northeast Asian economic area can not be separated from these changes and will greatly depend on how multilateral and regional trends progress in this A.-P. region.
APEC has pursued open regionalism and is based on non-discriminatory principle. This multilateralism can be compatible with regionalism (NAFTA and AFTA) under the condition that the latter tries to meet multilateral efforts for freeing economic transactions in the A.-P. region. In this context, a closer multilateral economic cooperation on government level in the medium-teen, and an economic integration institution in the longer-term will not be excluded.
Based on some homogenous factors (for ex. geographical approximity, cultural background and historical relations), a natural economic area is forming in the N-E Asian region comprising diverse countries. This region possesses some merits to develop into one of the world economic growth poles : great economic potential including abundant resources, large market and increasing economic dependency among the countries concerned.
Even though the visible advantages seem to be considerable by organizing a multilateral economic copperation framework on governmental level in this region, there exist for the moment many obstacles for this. Therefore, firm conviction for the pursuit of common prosperity, good will of the countries concerned for the common share of burden and committment to cotinuous cooperation are needed in order to promote N-E Asian economic community.