BY RORY JOHNSTON, SARAH MISU LEE, SARAH MISTAK AND SEAN TYLER
Supervised by Deanna Horton, Senior Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs
deanna.horton@utoronto.ca
Mapping Canada’s Footprint in Asia: Canada can do better
Much of what we know about Canada’s presence in Asia is not comprehensive or easily accessible, and this gap in the public narrative concerning Canada’s footprint in Asia is to the detriment of Canadian business as well as Asian market economies.
A group of students at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs have worked to answer the question “What is Canada doing in Asia?” by going beyond the usual suspects in economic indicators.
The CanAsia mapping project tracks Canadian presence in Asia by pulling together and analysing publically available country- and Canadian company-level data. This information will be presented in an interactive, multi-layered map that visualizes Canada’s presence in the region. The project examined sixteen countries (the “A-16”), namely China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea, as well as the 10 member states of ASEAN. The project also contextualizes Canada’s engagement by benchmarking Canadian performance against comparator OECD countries, and in the case of investment, with the major economies in Asia.
By the numbers, Canada is falling behind its competitors in this region both in terms of exports and investment. However, on the micro level, the research garnered some interesting stories on market preference, information and communications technology (ICT), and education, covering almost 500 companies and organizations in over 1300 locations. In addition, the project data pointed to energy as a sector of potential.
