Date: 30 July ，2007
Title:Seminar for Politics, Economy, History in Asia
We invited Professor Bin Wong, Director of the UCLA Asia Center, to give a talk on paradigm formulation based on his understanding of the Global COE framework. On the basis of the historical understanding of public finance and public policies articulated in China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997), he outlined arguments from the 18th century to the present. He pointed out that in cases when the European sovereign states and their regional body, the EU, absorb and redistribute the surpluses of the residents of their regions, they do so based on a politico-philosophical foundation rooted in a historical path dependence, and lack a universality that could be fitted to other regions. He argued that this leads to difficulties concerning the issue of distributing global public goods today, where there is no world government. Citing the Coalition for Rainforest Nations as an example, he discussed the possibility of “regional public goods” differentiated from global public goods. (Sugihara Kaoru)