This volume addresses the two key financing constraints that firms must face: taxation and finance. The taxation analysis focuses on how tax systems in selected Asian economies affect growth and the relative competitiveness of foreign and domestic enterprises. It outlines key features of the systems and provides a set of guidelines for potential foreign investors as to how these systems compare with each other (and with those in Canada and the United States) and predict future developments (including financial innovation and the internet).

The study of financial frameworks focuses on corporate finance and analyzes the relationship between financing patterns and the level of development of securities markets and financial liberalization in the region. It focuses on the issue of how firms finance investments and the extent to which they depend on retained earnings and funding obtained through the market.

Both studies include Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines. Both also consider the implications of taxation for savings and investment flows in domestic economies and across borders-and the implications of public sector demand for savings for corporate financing constraints.

Richard M. Bird is Professor Emeritus of Business Economics at Rotman School of Management.

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Varouj Aivazian is Professor, Department of Economics, University of Toronto.

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

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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.

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