Production Sharing In East Asia

Global Production and Trade in East Asia focuses on the profound change that the traditional paradigm of production and international trade has undergone in the last two decades or so as a result of worldwide trade and investment liberalization. This ongoing transformation has been both aided and stimulated by advances in telecommunications, transportation, and information management. The liberalization of trade and investment on the one hand and advances in communications technology on the other have further promoted global production networks in which vertical stages of final goods are fragmented across countries. International fragmentation of production, which enables international division of labor not only in final products but also in vertically related components, is more evident than ever before. The book documents the process of international production fragmentation and trade in East Asian economies, studies the mechanics of the process, explores the theory behind the phenomenon, and identifies important policy implications. It focuses on production fragmentation and trade in East Asia because this is the part of the world where the phenomenon is most visible. With contribution by well-known international economics scholars from North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, the book distinguishes itself with high global quality and rich regional content. It achieves a fine balance between theory, policy, and empirical work. This book will interest scholars of international trade, foreign investment and international business, regional specialists in East Asian economies, policymakers and advisors in international economic relations, and anyone else who follows important economic issues of globalization.

Components have been a dynamic leading sector in East Asian imports and exports. East Asian global exports of parts and components totaled $178 billion in 1996; imports, $12 billion less. Components now account for a fifth of East Asian exports of manufactures.

Production networks have been at the heart of the recent growth in trade among East Asian countries. Fragmentation trade, reflected mainly in the trade in parts and components, is expanding more rapidly than the conventional trade in final goods. This is mainly due to the relatively more favorable policy setting for international production, agglomeration benefits arising from the early entry into this new form of specialization, considerable intercountry wage differentials in the region, lower trade and transport costs, and specialization in products exhibiting increasing returns to scale. The economic integration of China has deepened production fragmentation in East Asia, countering fears of crowding out other countries for international specialization. International production fragmentation in East Asia has intensified intraregional trade but has depended heavily on extraregional trade in final goods. While production networks centered on China have contributed significantly to growth in East Asia, they also breed vulnerabilities. They have not automatically led to technology spillovers and have led to an extreme interdependence across East Asian countries.

Recent years has seen a sharp increase in the trade of intermediate goods between ASEAN countries and China, reflecting the emergence of China as a regional “assembly centre” and sourcing the bulk of parts and components from countries in South-East and North-East Asia in the production of final goods for export to the United States and the European Union. This expansion of trade in intermediates is closely linked to the spread of international production networks (IPNs) in Asia. The expansion raises important new analytical and policy challenges generating rapidly growing literature. This study focuses on how new patterns of production and trade influence the effects of exchange rates on international trade flows of manufactured goods, and draws attention to several ways in which IPNs have altered the nature of international production and trade.

Spatial fragmentation of production is linked with two great waves of unbundling. The first one was a century and a half ago when the spatial location of production of goods was separated from their consumption. We live in the age of a second unbundling where certain operations within the same factory can be fragmented and performed elsewhere. There is trade in certain tasks and components which was made possible by cheaper and better communication and transport. This book considers production networks in East Asia, which is and will continue to be the most dynamic economic region in the decades to come. Miroslav N. Jovanovi , University of Geneva, Switzerland Intermediate input trade is regarded as an important contributory factor in explaining the increase in world trade in recent years. This timely book presents, for the first time, meticulous empirical analyses of the growth of input trade, and includes detailed studies that capture the main features and characteristics of production networks in East Asia. Intermediate input trade has grown markedly in East Asia, and at a much faster rate than in the rest of the world. Since the early 1990s, when technological developments made it possible to separate the production process into many stages, East Asia as a region has developed sophisticated production networks in the manufacture of various products. Different countries have installed production stages according to their levels of technology or factor endowments, and consequently sequential production stages are now located across various countries. In order to produce final goods, East Asian nations have therefore relied on the trade of inputs back and forth. Containing unique and important data, this book will appeal to academics, researchers and policymakers interested in trade, economic integration and Asian studies.

This book presents a deeper understanding of the on-going de facto economic integration in East Asia, looking at the extent of economic integration, what sort of integration has been accomplished, and comparing the level of integration reached and the path followed to that of the European Union.

This book answers the recently topical questions of how China’s processed trade affects the trade of Southeast Asia. What is Southeast Asia’s role in Factory Asia, the region’s complex of cross-border supply chains? What is Southeast Asia’s involvement in building or joining production networks in the region? And, most important, how can Southeast Asia increase the value added of its products and improve its competitiveness? This book provides rigorous analysis of how trade policy affects value added, highly disaggregated at the firm and product level, of the six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Viet Nam – and combines this with thorough examinations of their trade, industrial and labour policies.