Global Economic Change and Cyber Networks: East Asia’s Economic and Security Threats in Perspective

Abstract

This chapter assesses the linkages between global economic transformation and the evolution of the cybernetic revolution and evaluates the national economic and security implications of these relationships. It does so with specific reference to Northeast Asia and specifically Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The last quarter of the twentieth century was remarkable for a fundamental move towards the creation of a genuinely global political economy. Taking Castells’ (2000) definition, this global economy is ‘an economy whose core components have the institutional, organisational, and technological capacity to work as a unit in real time, or in chosen time, on a planetary scale’ (p. 102). As this definition suggests, this transformation was driven in large part by technological innovation in communications and information technology but has concomitant institutional and organizational transformations that characterizes it for Castells as an ‘informational’ economy.