Time to Reassess the Dialogue's Cross-Border Vision
A conference* I just attended in Hong Kong on cross-border regions around the world has persuaded me that it's time to take a fresh look - and hopefully a more realistic look - at our own San Diego/Tijuana region.
Ten years ago this month, at its first public forum, San Diego Dialogue offered a vision of San Diego and Tijuana evolving into a global trading region. The centerpiece of this vision was a gradually emerging system of crossborder production that would link sophisticated research and development in San Diego with efficient, just-in-time manufacturing in Tijuana. This, in turn, would stimulate major investments in the region's airports, ports and railroads. It would also result in tens of thousands of solid, middle class jobs in trade and related business services.
Those middle class jobs were what we really cared about. It was clear then, and it is still clear, that a San Diego economy split between a high-tech sector and a tourism sector would not provide enough middle class job opportunities for our children. Only the development with Tijuana of a global trading economy was likely to do that.
The vision was a worthy one, but now, ten years later, it still seems like a distant prospect. It could yet happen, but not soon and not easily. At least it's not the direction in which our regional economy has been evolving.
It should be obvious. Manufacturing in Tijuana is no better integrated with R&D in San Diego today than it was ten years ago. Our trade infrastructure remains anemic. Our trade in goods, though it has grown in numbers, hasn't changed much in form. It still consists mainly of producing TV sets in Tijuana and trucking them into the United States. In other words, in this era of globalization our region has been mostly dead in the water.
Meanwhile, cross-border regions elsewhere have been evolving into dynamic, integrated trade economies. Consider Hong Kong and mainland China's Guangdong province. By the end of 1999, Hong Kong's direct investment in Guangdong amounted to $64 billion. Hong Kong companies now employ, either directly or indirectly, nearly five million mainland workers in Guangdong. This is 20 times the size of Hong Kong's own manufacturing workforce. Around 40,000 companies involving Hong Kong interests are registered in Guangdong.
On a lesser scale, Singapore - a city state of 4 million people with limited land and labor - has established over the last ten years an impressive zone of economic cooperation with Indonesia's Riau province and Malaysia's Johor province. Singapore has orchestrated the investment of billions of dollars of public and private sector funds in the joint development of infrastructure, industry, services, tourism and water resources with Riau and Johor.
Hong Kong and Singapore are frequently mentioned as economic development models for San Diego, but the comparison seems increasingly farfetched. Thus this issue of San Diego Dialogue Report explores where the vision of a global trading region went astray, muses about the prospects here of any kind of cross-border partnership, and offers some thoughts on future directions.
* The Central Policy Unit of the Hong Kong Goverment sponsored the conference. Three cross-border regions were featured: the Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia Growth Triangle, the Oresund region of Denmark and Sweden, and San Diego/Tijuana.