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on South East Asia |
| By: | Hal Hill |
| Abstract: | The Philippine economy has long been the East Asian outlier. In the early postwar period, with a per capita income higher than many of its neighbors, it was forecast to be one of Asia’s most dynamic economies. However, beginning in the mid-1970s, its growth trajectory increasingly diverged from its high-growth neighbors. By 2000, its per capita income remained roughly the same as it had been in 1980. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, the Philippines rejoined the East Asian mainstream, growing at a rate comparable to that of other Southeast Asian counterparts and faster than its traditional comparator, Thailand. This paper explores these development dynamics and identifies key development issues that need to be addressed if the current growth trajectory is to be maintained and accelerated. |
| Keywords: | Philippines, East Asia, macroeconomic policy, economic openness, living standards, institutions |
| JEL: | N15 O53 Z18 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pas:papers:2026-01 |
| By: | Zou, Tao; Gong, Yundan |
| Abstract: | We study how third-country supply chains reconfigure under the 2018-2019 US tariff escalation on Chinese goods, using comprehensive transaction-level trade and domestic business-to-business records for firms in Vietnam. Exploiting exogenous variation in firm-level tariff exposure constructed from pre-treatment export portfolios, we find that both value-added processing and transshipment contribute to triangular trade through Vietnam, but activate on distinct timelines: transshipment responds immediately while processing activates mainly after the May 2019 escalation signals tariff permanence. Supply chain network adjustment precedes trade value expansion, with upstream Chinese supplier diversification beginning first, local intermediate sourcing activating later, and downstream US buyer adjusting last. Opening the third-country supply chain interior, we show that over half of the tariff-induced local sourcing expansion channels Chinese intermediate content, and that local sourcing from China-embedded local suppliers responds at 3.2 times the magnitude of independent local suppliers. These results indicate that global value chains relocation to Vietnam activated processing capacity but extended rather than displaced Chinese supply chain influence in the third country. |
| Keywords: | trade war;supply chain reconfiguration;local sourcing;Vietnam |
| JEL: | F13 F14 F23 L14 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:139083 |
| By: | Achyuta Adhvaryu; Levina Adiputri; Valentina Brailovskaya; Priyanka Dua; Jenny Susan John; Pratibha Joshi; Terry Muthahhari; Rivandra Royono; Jack Thunde |
| Abstract: | We provide descriptive evidence on women's experiences in platform-based driving and delivery work using survey and administrative data from India and Indonesia. Partnering with major two-wheeler platforms, we study representative samples of drivers, oversampling women to examine gender differences (India: 404 women, 2, 153 men; Indonesia: 892 women, 2, 114 men). Female participation is extremely low -- 0.8% in India and 1.5% in Indonesia -- consistent with barriers related to safety concerns, cultural norms, and limited access to required assets. Among women who do enter, platform work is used differently than by men: women work fewer hours, are more likely to log in during free time, and place greater value on flexibility and supplemental earnings. Women earn less per hour than men -- by 6-8% in India and 8-22% in Indonesia -- differences that align with gendered choices over working times, locations, and service types, likely shaped by safety and domestic constraints. Women also face distinct challenges: higher reported harassment in both countries and, in Indonesia, widespread customer discrimination and higher accident rates. At the same time, a disproportionate share of women were unemployed before joining the platform, and women are more likely than men to report higher current earnings relative to prior work. Together, the evidence highlights how flexibility coexists with persistent gender-specific risks, constraints, and unequal returns in location-based platform work in low- and middle-income country contexts. |
| JEL: | J22 J46 O12 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35467 |
| By: | Chris A. Avalos; Trang T. Hoang; Eva Van Leemput |
| Abstract: | In recent years, Vietnam has attracted considerable attention as a potential major beneficiary of the 2018-19 U.S.-China tariff increases, reflecting substantial trade diversion as exports shifted away from China (Alfaro and Chor, 2023; Freund et al., 2024). As shown in the left panel of Figure 1, U.S. imports from China declined sharply after the 2018-19 tariffs, while imports from Vietnam tripled by 2025. |
| Date: | 2026–07–17 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfn:103556 |
| By: | Giovanni Donato; Emmanouil Kitsios |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the short- and medium-term effects of the 2018–19 China-U.S. tariff increases on the trade and investment flows of ASEAN member economies. Using granular trade data, we demonstrate that several ASEAN countries experienced a disproportionate growth in exports of products that were targeted by these tariffs. To further explore the dynamic and often immediate responses of international capital flows to these trade policy shifts, we leverage a novel firm-level FDI database that allows us to identify surges in sectoral investment inflows. Among ASEAN countries, Vietnam stands out as the one where FDI in targeted sectors grew notably faster during 2018–19, likely contributing to its observed export gains over the medium term. At the same time, our analysis reveals that trade gains in targeted products have not universally translated into stronger overall export performance across ASEAN. More generally, while trade reallocation may yield short- and medium-term gains, these gains can be offset over time by the higher long-term aggregate losses associated with trade fragmentation. |
| Keywords: | ASEAN; Fragmentation; Tariffs; Global Value Chains; Trade; FDI; Difference-in-difference |
| Date: | 2026–06–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/118 |
| By: | Prema-chandra Athukorala; Archanun Kohpaiboon |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the growth trajectory and current state of Thailand’s automotive hub—often dubbed the "Detroit of the East"—and the adjustment challenges it faces in transitioning from the combustion engine era to the electric vehicle era. The findings suggest that Thailand’s success has been driven by a combination of structural changes in the global automotive industry, which opened opportunities for peripheral countries to join production networks, and the pragmatic, market-oriented policy approach of Thai authorities, which made the country an attractive location for international production. Despite this impressive performance during the combustion engine era, Thailand's automotive sector is now undergoing significant structural adjustments due to the rise of electric vehicles. Whether Thailand can continue to function as a global automobile hub under the emerging dominance of Chinese BEV manufacturers remains uncertain. Even under the optimistic scenario of vehicle assembly continues to expand in Thailand under Chinese dominance, the parts and components segment—which accounts for the bulk of employment in the industry—is likely to face a substantial contraction in the BEV era. This gloomy prospect underscores the need for a reorientation of industrial and labour market policies, including targeted support for supplier upgrading, workforce reskilling, and the development of complementary manufacturing and services capabilities to mitigate employment losses. |
| Keywords: | Thailand, automobiles, battery electrical vehicles (BEVs), combustion engine vehicles (ICEs), industrialisation, globalisation |
| JEL: | F13 F14 F23 L16 O19 O25 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pas:papers:2026-03 |
| By: | Arianto A. Patunru |
| Abstract: | Services are increasingly embedded in manufacturing production and exports, but their role in developing-country manufacturing remains under-examined. This paper studies servicification in Indonesian manufacturing by combining OECD TiVA evidence on services embodied in manufacturing exports with plant-level data from Indonesia’s Survei Industri for 1985–2014. The macro evidence shows that services account for a substantial share of manufacturing export value added, reinforcing the importance of producer services for manufacturing competitiveness. The plant-level analysis focuses on purchased industrial services, a narrow but ob-servable measure of input servicification. Industrial-service use is limited but persis-tent: most plants report no such purchases, while user firms tend to be larger, more import-intensive, more foreign-owned, and more export-oriented. Fixed-effects re-gressions show that the continuous service-input share is positively associated with gross output per worker, while its relationship with value added per worker is weaker. The extensive margin is more robust: plants that purchase industrial ser-vices have higher subsequent labour productivity, especially in gross-output terms. Results for exporting firms are positive but less robust. The findings suggest that servicification is not only a macro value-chain phenomenon but also a plant-level feature associated with manufacturing performance. |
| Keywords: | servicification, manufacturing, services, global value chains, Indonesia, pro-ductivity, exports |
| JEL: | F14 F61 L60 L80 O14 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pas:papers:2026-04 |
| By: | Hup, Mark; de Zwart, Pim |
| Abstract: | How does the expansion of commodity export production impact the skill premium in a developing economy? Drawing on a newly-constructed dataset of regionally-disaggregated production figures and wages, we provide new evidence that agricultural commodity production can increase the skill premium if such production involves extensive local processing. This local processing can be necessitated by the biological features of the commodity. In the case of early twentieth-century Indonesia, coffee beans underwent little local processing. In contrast, sugar cane needed to be processed locally because it deteriorated quickly after harvesting. The production process from sugar cane to highly-refined ‘superior sugar’ was capital- and skill-intensive. We also provide evidence that the capital that enabled this local processing can be seen as North-South capital flows and that value chain upgrading occurred. Using several instruments exploiting exogenous variation in global market prices and local production suitability, we find evidence for a causal effect of sugar production on the skill premium. Whereas increased demand for unskilled workers was easily matched by rising supply, especially in areas well-connected to overland transportation infrastructures, this was not the case for skilled labour, so the skill premium rose. |
| Keywords: | International trade; Skill premium; Wage inequality; Indonesia |
| JEL: | F16 J20 N35 O10 |
| Date: | 2025–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20459 |
| By: | Ari Kokko (Copenhagen Business School); Nguyen Tien Thong (Nha Trang University); Katariina Nilsson Hakkala (Asian Development Bank) |
| Abstract: | This study explores the impact of subnational institutions on Viet Nam’s provincial manufacturing sector, comparing foreign-invested and domestic firms using a two-step difference GMM model with data from 63 provinces (2006–2020). Results show that changes in subnational institutions, measured by the Provincial Competitiveness Index, have little effect on economic complexity, revenues, employment, productivity, or firm size. Unexpectedly, weaker governance in areas like land access, transparency and legal institutions sometimes leads to better performance. This weak connection persists across all samples, periods, controls, and estimation methods, likely due to the dominance of foreign-invested companies and their limited interaction with local firms, which impacts overall firm development. |
| Keywords: | FDI;provincial competitiveness index;business climate;economic complexity;manufacturing performance |
| JEL: | F63 L53 O12 O25 |
| Date: | 2026–07–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:adbewp:023110 |
| By: | Stefano Carattini; Hanwei Huang; Tejendra P. Singh; Frank Pisch |
| Abstract: | Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of China's world market integration in the early 2000s to provide direct empirical evidence on three such mechanisms, corresponding to each pollution scope: direct pollution at firms' locations (scope-1), indirect pollution from energy generation (scope-2), and indirect pollution from the supply chain (scope-3). We combine granular satellite data on air pollution with detailed information on manufacturing firms and coal power plants, and leverage exogenous foreign demand shocks for identification. Three main findings emerge: exporting firms reduce local pollution; pollution levels around coal power plants rise due to regional export shocks; and upstream suppliers reduce pollution in the face of export demand shocks to downstream firms. Our findings point to China's reliance on coal power plants to fuel its export-driven growth as one of the main drivers of the rise in pollution. |
| Keywords: | trade, pollution, satellite, supply chain, coal power plants, electricity |
| Date: | 2026–07–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2198 |
| By: | Carattini, Stefano; Huang, Hanwei; Pisch, Frank; Singh, Tejendra Pratap |
| Abstract: | Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still only scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. In this paper, we exploit the unique episode of China’s world market integration in the early 2000s to provide direct empirical evidence on three such mechanisms. We combine granular satellite data on air pollution with detailed information on manufacturing firms and coal power plants, and leverage exogenous foreign demand shocks for identification. Three main findings emerge: exporting firms reduce local pollution (scope-1); pollution levels around coal power plants rise due to regional export shocks (scope-2); and upstream suppliers reduce pollution in the face of export demand shocks to downstream firms (scope-3). Our findings point to China’s reliance on coal power plants to fuel its export-driven growth as one of the main drivers of the rise in pollution. |
| JEL: | D22 F18 F64 Q53 Q56 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20650 |
| By: | Zhou, Sili; Ma, Chang; Rebucci, Alessandro |
| Abstract: | Chinese private portfolio equity outflows, though small compared to other Chinese outflows, are growing rapidly because of capital account liberalization and capital flight. Using granular stock-holding data on Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor (QDII) mutual funds, we identify a nascent financial channel of international transmission of Chinese monetary policy to world stocks. Event study analysis around monetary policy announcement days reveals that monetary policy tightening depresses returns of country equity indexes and individual U.S. stocks with QDII fund exposure relative to non-exposed stocks. The results are robust to controlling for the real transmission channel of Chinese monetary policy and other confounders. The effect is driven by smaller and less liquid firms, but not by China-concept stocks or those highly exposed to China's macroeconomic shocks. We also find that the results are driven by household portfolio rebalancing from more to less risky assets following the announcement. |
| JEL: | F30 G10 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20672 |
| By: | Minh Ha-Duong (CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - Université Paris-Saclay - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris) |
| Abstract: | Energy policy models need asset-level data that are complete, current, historical and prospective, and traceable to authoritative primary sources. Yet across much of the world these data arrive late or incomplete. We introduce a computable benchmark for this task: reconstruct the register of Vietnam's 177 thermal power plants and score the result against a hand-compiled, per-cell-sourced reference. We find that the task is hard for today's AI systems. Fourteen language models answering from memory recovered much less than the Wikipedia lists contain, even though these lists had presumably been in their training corpora for years. We observed that a reference-free signal, the within-run variability of the reported capacities, correlates with accuracy, letting us screen out weak runs without the reference. We then tested the commercial frontier of mid-2026: four agentic systems with web access and extended reasoning. Only one improved coverage over the memory-only query, and a multi-step harness degraded three of the four. A curated document set improved coverage, most for the weaker agents. Fusing the lists from multiple runs more than doubles recall. We conclude that an evergreen statistical-quality register requires deliberate knowledge engineering. We propose deriving datasets as dated snapshots from a sourced, auditable knowledge base, mechanically updated from a periodically harvested corpus, with humans in the loop to vet sources and resolve the hard tail. |
| Keywords: | AI benchmark, Large language models, Agentic systems, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Energy statistics, Knowledge engineering, Vietnam, Thermal power |
| Date: | 2026–06–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:ciredw:hal-05658462 |
| By: | Lucie POINET (LEMNA Ð Laboratoire d'Economie et de Management de Nantes Atlantique); Pierre-Alexandre MAHIEU (LEMNA Ð Laboratoire d'Economie et de Management de Nantes Atlantique) |
| Abstract: | Previous literature has widely explored the influence of descriptive social norms on individualsÕ pro-environmental behavior. However, despite a growing interest in the subject, the role of geographical proximity of the reference group remains unclear. Our study seeks to fill this gap by investigating the impact of a descriptive social norm at two scales: local (neighborhood), and global (city). In this aim, we incorporate descriptive norms as attributes in a discrete choice survey. Our findings reveal that only the local social norm exerts a significant influence on organic waste sorting behavior, while the global social norm does not show a significant effect at conventional statistical levels. These results highlight the importance of considering the geographical proximity of the reference group when studying descriptive social norms. The policy implications of these findings are discussed. |
| Keywords: | Descriptive Social Norm, Local Social Norm, Discrete Choice Experiment, , |
| JEL: | C99 D91 Q51 Q53 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fae:wpaper:2024.09 |