سیاست ها و استراتژی های پایدار در آسیا: چالش های رشد سبز  Sustainable policies and strategies in Asia: Challenges for green growth

1. Introduction The world economy and global community has been significantly affected by the most rapidly changing paradigm shift in Northeast Asian countries (OECD, 2014; Rozman, 2004). The effective leadership of the government and the selective concentration by the global business leaders in this region has lead to this initial stage of dynamic performance (Choi, 2015a). In the early 2000s, China became known as the global factory, due to the huge inbound FDI produced at the lowest costs in the world. However, this rapid growth made a big challenge for the government to fight against severe environmental crises. China became the world’s largest consumer of coal, using about 45% of the global total in the year 2010. It is also the largest emitter of CO2. Recently, industrial air pollution such as particulate matter smaller than 2.5 μm wide (PM2.5) and other GHG levels have been seriously high in China. Berkeley Earth released a study showing that air pollution kills an average of 4000 people every day in China, or 17% of all China’s deaths. For 38% of the population, the average air they breathe is “unhealthy” by US standards (Berkeley Earth, 2015). Likewise, Japan, due to the lack of any natural resource such as coal, has depended heavily on nuclear energy for the past half century. Since nuclear energy is more beneficial than fossil fuels in terms of carbon emissions and has lower unit production costs, Japan became the third biggest user of nuclear energy, with 54 commercial reactors nationwide. Japan had depended on nuclear reactors for one third of its energy. Unfortunately, the tragic Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, destroyed and damaged 17 of these reactors and due to increasing panic about nuclear instability following the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the Japanese government proclaimed a zero-nuclear economy. In order to overcome the environmental crisis, the Chinese government declared “war against pollution” at the opening of the annual meeting of parliament in March 2014. Korea is not the exceptional for this environmental crisis. Every year in the spring, yellow sand storms from Mongolian deserts travel to the Korean peninsula, an event that has become much more serious recently because sand storms bring with them the industrial toxic air of the Northeast China. However, the Korean government emphasized much on the advance e-government or government 3.0 to overcome these environmental mishaps. Using an idea labeled smart revolution, the government tried to utilize all these new challenges as the opportunities toward the green growth. Other Asian countries are on the same path even if each country may be operating at different speeds and display different efforts toward green growth. Since these countries are proactive in establishing themselves in the frontier of information and communication technology (IT), it could be insightful for global community to learn more about green growth strategies within the context of green IT. Especially, global companies in the region started out by employing catch-up strategies to overcome the challenges of fierce price competition, their subsequent espousal of innovative strategies in green growth, with the strong support of government policies, has gone a long way in establishing them as new trendsetters (Choi, 2015a). All these new challenges in the region should be analyzed in more detail based on their sustainable performance because it is vital to understand why some firms are more innovative and develop more innovative projects than others, and what determines innovation performance. It is this premise that is the basic proposition for this special edition. Many researchers point out that most Asian companies have been directly or indirectly managed by government, and thus it is a formidable challenge for these companies to maintain sustainable performance under the fierce pressure of the government for the green growth (Buckley, 2009; Choi and Lee, 2009). In its leading role, the government could result in very effective performance, but only in the short term or in initial stages (Gao, 2015). As we shall see in this special edition, the pro-active role of the government leadership has been losing its competitiveness over time (Choi et al., 2010), and thus governance factors on the green growth become much more important as the Asian countries enters the second stage of green growth. Therefore, it will be crucial to discuss the theoretical modeling underpinning these government policies and business strategic case studies in the most dynamic countries in the world.