Serving up successful recipes. The menu at CW's Singapore conference

Chemical companies in the US and Europe generally have little enough cause for optimism when examining domestic investment prospects in the short term. But when it comes to looking farther afield, there is no doubt that opportunities abound for companies in Asia/Pacific. The prospects for the region can start to be understood when taking into account that Asian GDP will equal that of North America or Europe by the end of the decade, and it is estimated to be four or five times that by the year 2050, as Eastman Chemical president Earnest Deavenport noted in his keynote speech at Chemical Week's third annual Asia/Pacific conference recently in Singapore. Moreover, consumption of products requiring chemicals, plastics, and synthetic fibers is forecast to rise at roughly twice the pace of economic growth-that is, 10%-12%. Eastman predicts that Asia/Pacific's market share of the chemicals sector will be the world's largest by 2002, increasing from 26% to 35%, with the value of industry production more than doubling, to $604 billion. Recent forecasts for 1993 GDP growth range from 4.7% in Hong Kong and Singapore at the low end to 12% for China at the top