The Belt and Road Initiative, the failed Trans Pacific Partnership, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and other high-level frameworks have all attempted to reshape the patterns of business affairs and economic alliances in the Asia-Pacific region through centrally managed planning.

This report explores a complementary perspective, asking how the patterns of preexisting business relationships in the region have developed and how organic patterns of interfirm relationships have evolved to tie regional economics together. It examines these interfirm relationships and maps the business networks that extend throughout the Asia-Pacific region. By doing so, it provides, for the first time, an integrated regional assessment of the network structure of interfirm governance in Asia.

In addition to offering a descriptive account of the structure, the analysis looks at suggestive structural factors that offer insight into the future of regional integration. In particular, it speculates that ethnic Chinese capitalists throughout Southeast Asia may be preferentially selected as partners, thereby offering avenues that would tie these economies more tightly to China’s growing sphere of influence. The intent of this study is to provide policymakers with a new lens through which to understand regional integration in the region. It builds on and informs the extensive body of RAND Corporation work on economic competition in the Indo-Pacific, including a series on regional responses to U.S.-China competition in the IndoPacific (see, e.g., Lin et al., 2020).