This workshop explores an "Agenda for Asia" for the 21st Century. Asia has achieved historically unprecedented sustained growth and development in past decades. Aggregate success hides, however, a great diversity of development experience among and within countries: not all shared equally in the benefits of the region's growth. As a consequence, Asia includes economies at very different stages of development, ranging from some of the poorest in the world, to global economic powers. Similarly, there remain wide differences within countries, reflecting the uneven distribution of the benefits of growth.

The Asian crisis of 1997, while exposing the fragility of the region's economies, obscures two basic features of Asia's economic evolution, with far more lasting implications for the global economy and the region's development. The first is Asia's rising importance, driven by its historically unprecedented growth. The second is that production-based integration has been a central factor in Asia's economic transformation and in its new global role. Regional integration has been a key factor in the rapid and sustained economic development of Asia, linking in a "virtuous circle" domestic development and regional economic restructuring. More particularly, although the Asian crisis focused attention on global capital flows, the emergence of international production networks is dramatically transforming the patterns of regional production, trade and investment-and the development options of the region's economies. Examining at the nature and implications of production networks provides a specific and important point of entry for exploring the future transformation of Asia in the global context, and the challenges of sustainable and equitable economic development, and regional cooperation.

The workshop is expected to strengthen economic cooperation among the participating countries with a view to providing more effective assistance to the region, and to promote spontaneous exchange of views; in order to analyse, identify, formulate and recommend policy options of direct relevance to senior decision makers in government, private sector and international institutions, within the broader context of the Asian economic integration.