Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, many transformations of systems, regimes or orders occurred at various levels of world politics. The aim of this paper is to clarify trends for transformation of regions and security in Asia by analyzing the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (SCO). In the post-Cold war era, the character and functions of regions have experienced major transformations such as the growing differentiation between “physical regions” and “functional regions.” With the dissolution of the bipolar system of the Cold War, security systems have changed from antagonistic ones to cooperative ones.

In the first decades of rapid independence, Central Asian countries reinforced the frame work of the modern nation-state while they sought new economic and political ties to replace those with the Soviet Union. For regional powers China and Russia, a new security system or regional cooperation is needed for their security in the post-Cold War era. Since 1987, China and Russia have been negotiating a new cooperative relationship regarding the Russo-Chinese border, which stretches 7000 km. With the break up of the Soviet Union, this bilateral negotiation changed to multilateral negotiation among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in 1992, and this multilateral agreement came to be called the “Shanghai Five.” With the addition of Uzbekistan to the Shanghai Five, the SCO was established in 2001. As Uzbekistan does not share a border with China, this multilateral forum changed its character and function. In addition, the emerging SCO suggests trends for transformation of regions and security in post-Cold War Asia.

Since the Asian currency crisis in 1997, East Asian countries have been highly cognizant of the importance of international coordination of currency policies. Within the framework of the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) and Asian Bond Market Initiative (ABMI), policy dialogues now progress pragmatically among ASEAN countries, Japan, China, and South Korea. While the CMI is expected to serve as “crisis management” once a crisis occurs, it is not designed for “crisis prevention” and lacks action to prevent a currency crisis. To prevent and manage possible currency crises, this paper discusses how we should develop the CMI or future policy coordination in the correct direction of “crisis prevention.”

Strengthening of the surveillance over each member country, constituting a Contingent Credit Line (CCL) for the concerned country, and pooling or earmarking foreign reserves should be added to the current CMI framework. Establishment of a neutral and independent organization is also needed in order to implement an effective surveillance process.

Although introducing a common currency basket peg system might be a solution for the coordination failure of choosing exchange rate system and exchange rate policy; inter-group or intra-regional policy coordination will be still essential even in a potential East Asian common currency area. In this sense, this paper proposes introduction of a deviation indicator for each East Asian currency from the AMU in countries' exchange rate fluctuations in order to achieve reliable surveillance and effective policy coordination in exchange rate policy. The monetary authorities in East Asian countries can minimize this deviation indicator to reduce the misalignment of their exchange rates among intra-regional currencies.

If the Japanese government were to implement a policy initiative to build a regional community among East Asian nations similar to the EU, one of the most challenging policy issues would be the establishment of an international labour migration scheme. As experience in the EU shows, the first step to be taken is bilateral agreements between neighbouring nations. As of last year, the Japanese government started to change its immigration control policy through the process of an economic partnership agreement with the Philippines. It amended the criteria for the “Entertainer” status of residence permission to eliminate the risk of trafficking in persons. It also introduced a new scheme to accept nurses and caregivers from the Philippines.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze effects of South Korea's property tax of comparison to Japan, the United States (New York State) and Great Britain. We compared the property tax system of South Korea with that of other countries and made an option model taking into account each country's Property Tax System in order to analyze the effects of property tax in each country. The property tax of the United States (New York State) and the council tax of Great Britain are relatively neutral to the property market. South Korea's property tax is similar to that of Japan and is neutral, in comparison to Japan. However, South Korea's property tax has unique characteristics such as progressive taxation and these characteristics suffocate property investment.

For the evaluation of public services, CS Portfolio Analysis and Analytic Hierarchy Process have been widely used in Japan. However, these methods have disadvantages. First, the selective questionnaires that are used analyze only those items pre-selected by surveyors. Items that fall beyond the scope of the questionnaires may remain unchanged, resulting in dissatisfaction among residents. Second, it is doubtful that a government could directly translate the survey results into the design of services; the results may need to be interpreted into the “true” needs of residents in view of engineering.

To overcome such limitations, we used Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to evaluate public services. QFD is widely used in quality engineering to develop new products that satisfy market needs, with a short lead-time. We applied QFD to snow removal, a public service, toward designing budget allocations for each snow removal work item by converting road user needs into snow removal work items and comparing them with current budget allocations to evaluate the current level of services (LOS) from the road user's perspective. In doing so, we surveyed winter transportation behavior among businesses. The survey results confirm that QFD can be used to evaluate the current LOS.