Abstract
With hopes for a sustainable economic growth in Asia, the mighty force leading the world's economy, the author has studied the petrochemical industries in East Asia, one of key factors in the Asian economy, looking into such issues as a history of formation and development of those industries for more than a decade since 1980, their in-region structural features, their dynamism, and development of their economic interdependence.
In this study, the author took a multinational, multiregional point of view, as if observing East Asia from a satellite aloft overhead, trying to analyze and digest the phenomena in multiple aspects.
This study eventually revealed the unique structure and behavior of the region's petrochemical industries: large demand and patterns oriented towards “economic interdependence”. The examinations have further confirmed that the interdependence became more definite in the former half of the 1990s and that the decisive factors in the industries' dynamic growth were, on the demand side, increases in great demand in China under a high economic growth and, on the supply side, increases in supply capacity created by competitive plant investment by Korean companies.
In the future, the most important factor that will govern the East Asian petrochemical industries' further dynamic growth would be the evolution of their interdependence; from the interdependence so far through importation/exportation of petrochemical producuts to closer interdependence through foreign direct investment by corporations either in out-of-region countries like Japan, the U. S. A., and European nations or in in-region countries. It can be said that those East Asian petrochemical industries entered a new stage in the latter half of the 1990s, just heading for the beginning of the 21st century.
