This course is designed to help students understand the transitional relations of East Asia through the lens of trade. The course will start with basic trade theories, including comparative advantage and economies of scale, to provide a foundation for country studies, including but not limited to China, Japan and Korea. During this process, the export-led growth model, politics of trade, and the role of currency in international trade will be integrated to enrich the analytical framework further. Some current trends will also be discussed, like the trade war, the RCEP and regional integration, and the impact of digitalization.
The overall difficulty of the course is moderate. Students, with or without a background in economics, will be equipped with appropriate analytical tools and country and regional knowledge for future work and study.
- Lehrende(r): Ling Fang
This course focuses on the international business and comparative management through the lens of content and cultural industry in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Globalisation, digitisation, de-globalisation as well as varieties of institutional environments provide opportunities and challenges to firms. The course uses the various segments of content and cultural industry to provide an understanding of complexities in the global economy. Cultural industries are “systems of organisations that produce and distribute cultural goods with substantive symbolic, aesthetic, or artistic value (Wang et. al., 2020)” Due to their unique characteristics, these industries produce distinctive business dynamics. Among others, East Asian cultural products, e.g., Japanese Anime and K-Pop, are the key cases to account for how international business operates. This course expects students to intensively engage in class discussion accompanied by weekly response papers and a term paper.
- Lehrende(r): Francis Yoon