Flow of Goods, People and Information among Cities of Northeast Asia

An examination is made of container movements, air cargo/passengers and telecommunications traffic in Northeast Asia during 1995. A drawback to studying flows between major cities is that information on telecommunications traffic is only available between countries. Also container traffic data are restricted to individual ports. Consequently, most attention is paid to movements of passenger aircraft between major cities derived from analysing timetables, particularly as they can be related to regional development concepts applied in Europe such as the 'blue banana' and 'bunches of grapes' concepts. A 'peas in a pod' may be a more appropriate movements are examined again in 1998 to gauge the impact of the Asian crisis.