Emerging Asian Economies: Are they really a challenge to the current Status Quo?

Abstract

The gradual shift of economic power towards Asia and in particular towards China is explored in this article using Immanuel Wallerstein’s and Fernand Braudel’s models of “world-economy” and of “historical capitalism”. Although some raw macro-economic data would suggest that economic power seems to have been gradually and inexorably shifting away from the Western economies and towards China, a more subtle analysis shows that a number of other factors, such as the difficulty to deal with the limits to growth in China as well as its limited institutional capacity seem to undermine the challenge to the current status quo.