Towards an Asian-Pacific or Atlantic Century?

Abstract

This paper aims to study whether the 21st century will be an Atlantic or an Asian-Pacific century. Indeed, the literature has been studying the reshaping of the world economy, motivated by the impressive economic growth of Asian countries observed in the last decades. As the main researchers have focusing on this problematic in a West versus Asia perspective, our main contribution is to give a different perspective, comparing the Atlantic with Asia-Pacific and, therefore, finding out the main features of each region.To do so, we identified the major trends on literature review, and through a quantitative analysis we describe the evolution in the period 1990-2018, using proxies for both regions. This analysis is mainly based on economic indicators, but we also analyse the political field.From a strengths and weaknesses analysis for each region, we were able to conclude that the Atlantic, despite including south emerging economies, has been losing its economic centrality. Nevertheless, an Asian-Pacific century is still uncertain, even though more probable than Atlantic’s. Although being the biggest economically region, the major FDI attractor and outward investor, as well as an increasingly relevant partner on merchandise trade, Asia-Pacific still faces some challenges regarding its soft power, influence in global governance and human development.