Introducing INDOPAC to the world: the focus of the regional business community has already turned towards the important and vital Indo-Pacific region, and an India-Asia Business Forum has been established to tackle the issues.

• Position: NEW REGION GROUPING - Cover story

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In the 21st century, businesses operating in the giant economies of India, China and in the surrounding region will be asked to create prosperity for their citizens at a speed and on a scale unprecedented in history.

Business cannot achieve this goal using the old structures and technologies that supported economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nor will it have the benefit of the abundant resources and careless attitudes to the environment that supported earlier periods of development.

Fundamental new business ideas are needed to realise the aspirations of the region's people in this new world.

Publisher Peter Charlton has conceived INDOPAC to act as an essential international forum for business leaders, working with government and civil society, to share their thinking on new ways to grow regional economies rapidly and sustainably.

Establishment of the forum will be a landmark in the region's emergence as the self-confident engine-room of growth in the 21st century.

An India-Asia Business Forum will be held in the Indo-Pacific region annually. The first forum is planned to be held in New Delhi early next year.

The need for a distinctive Indo-Pacific analysis of global issues

The Indo-Pacific region is set to embark on a process of development unlike any that has gone before. Its opportunities to do this are unique but so are its challenges and constraints.

If the region's economies succeed in meeting their individual growth objectives in the decades ahead they will have created more wealth in aggregate than now exists, and all in a single human lifetime, while facing constraints that have never before applied. Today, there are no clear ideas about how this momentous task is to be undertaken.

The region faces the unique challenge of maintaining per capita growth in the face of rapidly ageing and even falling populations in some countries: this has never been done before in any large economy. In other countries the challenge will remain to rein in unsustainably high birth rates which outrun efforts to generate prosperity.

The scale of the migration from countryside to urban areas needed for economic restructuring is unprecedented. Pressures for population movement will also extend well beyond national borders as large scale employment opportunities emerge in different parts of the region.

Energy and raw materials usage will be under pressure as never before. New technologies and processes must become extraordinarily more efficient so as to do much more with less. The already-developed world must participate in this, to make room for the needs of developing economies.

Economic integration will be the well-spring of increased productivity and economic growth. Will it be effective at regional level only or must it be global via the WTO? What will integration mean for maintenance of cultural identity? What tolerance for inequality is possible in a much more integrated region? How can...