Until recently, any assessment of the sustainability of East Asian growth would have been made with a strong qualification about its vulnerability to weakness in the international trading system. However, this may not necessarily be the case — that is, so long as East Asian states build constructively on the model of trade policy and expansion that has emerged since the mid-1980s. Over this time, The large majority of East Asian export growth has been to markets in East Asia itself. This is an important reason why strong growth was sustained in East Asian developing countries through the recession in the industrial countries.

It goes without saying that the opportunities for East Asian growth are greater if the markets of Europe and North America are expanding, and remaining open to increased volumes of intercontinental trade. But these influences on East Asian growth are becoming steadily less critical, as the scale of East Asian production and trade expands. It is now open to East Asia to consider continued commitment to multilateral open trade as the basis of a high growth strategy, even if the United States is unsympathetic to open trade, and remains aloof. This is a new element in Asia-Pacific economic relations, to which the political economy of trade policy will take some time to adjust on both sides of the Pacific.

The East Asian economies have in fact, and contrary to popular perception in the United States and Europe, undertaken more trade and economic liberalization in the last two decades than any other group of countries.

The reality of East Asian and Asia-Pacific regional trade expansion is very different from that which is emerging in North America and which is established and continuing to develop in Europe.

There has been no economically important trade-expanding discrimination in East Asia. Trade preferences within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region so far have had trivial effects, although the 1991 commitment by Heads of Government to move towards an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) will have future significance.