Why has Canada's trade with the East Asian economies declined when these economies are booming? What can be done about this performance?

Benchmarking the Canadian Business Presence in East Asia is the first in a series that examines Canadian economic relationships with the countries of East Asia. This volume examines the apparent paradox that even though East Asia is the world's most dynamic region, Canadian exports to the region have been declining since the late 1980s. In accounting for this paradox the study explores Asians' perceptions of Canadian performance and offers strategic suggestions from six of Canada's leading authorities on East Asia and international business.

This book will help Canadian managers to better understand: the strategies of Japanese multinationals and other East Asian firms and governments, the linkages between trade and investment, and the nature of the different business systems. It also establishes a systematic benchmark against which to judge future progress by Canadian business in the region.

Wendy Dobson, one of Canada's leading international economists, provides two unique vantage points based on her own experiences in the two countries and in the international system. One is top-down, informed by her role as Canada's Associate Deputy Minister of Finance responsible for international financial diplomacy in the G-7 in the late 1980s and more recently as a professor at the University of Toronto. The other perspective is bottom-up, drawing on her life and work in India in the 1960s, in a job that took her into politicians' offices and sent her into the villages, and her many visits to China starting in 1978, the year that its transformation began to emerge.

Since 1993 she has led research and teaching at the Rotman Institute for International Business at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. She has published twenty books and many articles on Asia and the international economy. Between 1995 and 2002 she was the managing editor of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada's Papers on Asia, published by University of Toronto Press. One of her books, Multinationals and East Asian Integration, won the Ohira Prize in 1998 for the best English-language book on Asia, and several of her other publications have been translated into Chinese.

Wendy Dobson's profile page

A.E. Safarian is a professor emeritus in the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

A.E. Safarian's profile page