Conservation of Private Forestland in the Northeast United States. The Role of Economic Incentives, Time Commitments, and ACORN

Although South-East Asia has always been the poor relation in the region (in 1999, for example, the GDP of the North- East Asian economy was more than nine times that of ASEAN), [887] it would have been impossible for North-East Asia to have played the same role because the latter remains too divided, riven by the animosity between Japan and China, and to a lesser extent that between South Korea and Japan, as well as distracted by the disputes over Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. As a result there is nothing like ASEAN in North-East Asia: such formal multilateral arrangements are almost completely absent. An important consequence of these various developments has been the effective exclusion of the United States from economic diplomacy in the region. This has never been China ’s stated aim, [888] but, intended or otherwise, it is what has happened in practice. The centrality that APEC enjoyed in the mid nineties, and in which the US was a key player, [889] now seems a distant memory. The marginalization of the US is also manifest in the Chiang Mai Initiative, first agreed in 2000 on the proposal of the Chinese, [890] which involves bilateral currency swap arrangements between the ASEAN countries, China, Japan and South Korea, thereby enabling East Asian countries to support a regional currency that finds itself under attack ...»