Border Economies in the Greater Mekong Subregion ed. by Masami Ishida (review)

Over the past ten years, studies on the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) have become increasingly numerous. The extent of this literature reflects the dynamism of current regional integration processes in continental Southeast Asia where commercial exchanges were first interrupted by decades of war, then limited by competition between rival political systems. In many of these works, the GMS, which includes Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and the southern provinces of China (Yunnan and Guangxi), is studied using either: an approach on a national scale, evaluating in particular the different policies adopted by each state to integrate the GMS; or a transnational approach, studying, for example, the reorganization of movements of migrants, transport or investments on a subregional scale. This volume’s contribution is that it fills a gap in the existing literature by analysing the impact of the development of the GMS on local spaces. It also directly evaluates the reasons behind the creation of economic corridors, which, according to the United Nations, should favour the development of peripheral areas rather than the main structural nodes.

This volume is divided into three parts and contains a great wealth of information on the local territories studied. The first part defines the directions of research and analysis structuring the case studies that are examined in the second part. The final part is a synthesis of the information contributed by the studies presented in Chapters 3 through 10.

The prologue concisely describes the main stages of the establishment of the GMS. Following this, it then identifies two main development possibilities for border economic zones: the cross-border movement of people and goods; and the development of border industries, border trade, tourism and casinos. This volume aims to measure and evaluate the reality of different economic activities conducted in these border areas. Chapter 2 cuts to the heart of cross-border movements as it deals with the Cross-Border Transport Agreement (CBTA), an agreement signed by the six countries of the GMS to simplify procedures when vehicles cross each border. Several studies emphasize that border crossings are the weakest links in the supply chains of economic corridors. After the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) made the reconstruction of transport infrastructure (“hard infrastructure”) conditional on the ratification of free trade agreements (“soft infrastructure”) between the parties concerned. Despite this, Ishida emphasizes in this chapter that border-crossing difficulties continue to persist. Chapter 2 is valuable also because it provides a detailed description of the stages that must be completed before the CBTA can be said to have been implemented in its entirety — all of the chapters featured in the second half of the volume use Ishida’s classification to evaluate the progress of the implementation of the CBTA in each of the border areas studied.

The second part of the volume contains eight chapters studying no less than fifteen border areas, twelve of which are located on a GMS economic corridor. The two main qualities of these chapters are that they all rely on extremely detailed, concrete knowledge of the border areas, and that they all use the same method of analysis — proof of real collaborative work instead of a mere juxtaposition of articles. After describing the main characteristics of the border studied, each chapter evaluates the quality and possibilities of crossing the border, by car, by bus or on foot, then analyses the economic activities that result directly from the presence of a border. Furthermore, most of the chapters have adopted a comparative approach, and study the economic development of several border areas in parallel. These are either situated on each side of the same border but in two different countries, or, alternatively, they might include two border cities on the same side of a border but located several kilometres from each other.

This systematic approach, and the numerous comparisons, make it possible to attempt to identify factors that either favour or penalize the economic development of...