And wastewater and cleaning solvents are regularly dumped untreated into the waterways.
Taiwan has a better-developed infrastructure than China.
Singapore offers attractive tax arrangements to new manufacturing operations.
Mexico it's closer to U.S.A. and aside from distribution costs, the wage rates are similar to Asia's and many of the other risks would be minimized.
COMPETING IN ASIA PACIFIC: Understanding the Rules of the Game.
According with the INSEAD-Euro-Asia Centre there are some important topics that westerns should be consider before making business with Asia Pacific countries, like government relations, business rules, social, customers, financial Issues, etc.
Government Relations: "Government- can mean different things in different countries, in some countries bureaucracy is more powerful than the government-Japan would be an example- while in others the government and the bureaucracy are hardly distinguishable, whatever the theoretical distinction may be -Vietnam and China-fall into this category.
The countries where government interference is perceived to be particularly strong are Vietnam, Korea, China, Indonesia and India (Fig 1).
Most countries are perceived to discriminate against foreign investors in some way (Fig 2), In China, observers note more advantages for local firms: the result perhaps of the withdrawal of various import duty incentives and preferential tax rates for foreign businesses, while at the same time the government remains reluctant- or unable- to reform the state owned enterprise sector.
Corruption plays a major role in countries like Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, China, Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan (Fig 3). The extent of petty and sometimes aggressive bribe-taking means that companies determined to behave honestly must resign themselves to slower progress on their projects and to the potential loss of business.
Business Rules (Fig4): There is general agreement that European or American rules of business cannot simply be transposed to the Asian regions.