The most important artery that connected the Far East with the European Russia and other Republics was the Trans Siberia Railways, which could exercise its power in the socialist planned economy. The Railways were subsidized by the State budget during the socialist period. After the transition to a market economy, the transportation cost by means of the Railways has soared due to an abolition of the subsidy, coupled with inflation factors. Thus it became difficult to transport goods between east and west in a vast country Russia. After the collapse of the highly centralized planned economy and its transition to a market economy, it is quite natural for the Russian Far East to direct its attention toward neighboring countries in the Northeast Asia.
II Megatrends.
We have to pay attention to the megatrends in the world. The first megatrend is globalization. In my opinion, this has two aspects. The one is a neutral aspect, that is, the fact that owing to application of results of scientific-technological development to the field of transportation and communication, it becomes increasingly easy for us to travel, transport goods, transmit information and transfer even money across borders, and consequently the globe became relatively small. In other words, this phenomenon is explained as an expansion of economic activities to the global scale. Thus the conceptions such as borders and sovereign states, which previously had important meanings, have relatively insignificant meanings now. The another aspect relates to the end of the Cold War. Since socialism with the Soviet Union as its top had collapsed, the confrontation between America and the Soviet Union had disappeared, and America's hegemony over the world was established. Owing to this fact, American values and standards are promulgated as the global standards.
The second megatrend is regionalism, which means a phenomenon that a group of countries strengthen their cooperation and unity.
