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on South East Asia |
| By: | Adolfo Jose Montesa (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman); Vincent Ramos (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman & Heidelberg University); Judy Padillon (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman); Carlos Harry De Taza (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman); Edgar Suguitan (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman); Rexian Irlandez (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman) |
| Abstract: | Since 1989, minimum wages in the Philippines have been set by regional tripartite wage boards, producing a patchwork of statutory floors whose levels, timing, and bite vary across the country. This article presents novel descriptive patterns of minimum wages, price levels, and employment using pooled Labor Force Survey microdata and the Occupational Wages Survey. We foreground three key findings. First, the real value of the minimum wage has been eroded by inflation since 1989 across all regions except NCR. Second, the minimum wage has a high bite of up to 1.2 times the median wage of the covered sector. This arguably reflects both a highly compressed wage distribution and the presence of exemption channels for smaller enterprises. Finally, in quarters succeeding wage orders, we find a reallocation pattern to wage bins just above the new wage floor, with no conclusive evidence of any immediate large-scale “displacement†of employment. Reflecting on these patterns, we lay out why unbiased estimates of employment effects remain challenging in the Philippine context and how a more holistic analysis of wage setting is complicated by the lack of transparency in and predictability of the existing wage-setting regime. We close with proposals for the path forward. |
| Keywords: | minimum wages; stacked event-study design; reallocation; Philippines |
| JEL: | J31 J08 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:phs:dpaper:202608 |
| By: | E. Annette Balaoing-Pelkmans (School of Economics, University of the Philippines Diliman) |
| Keywords: | Philippines; upper-middle income; structural transformation; OFW; industrial policy; middle-income trap; premature deindustrialization; Tatak Pinoy Strategy |
| JEL: | O14 O25 O53 F22 J24 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:phs:dpaper:202607 |
| By: | Mayang Sari; Suphi Sen; Hans-Peter Weikard |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of a 2018 reform that expanded the scope of corporate income tax exemptions in Indonesia to include investments in renewable energy capacity. We find a large increase in the share of renewables in total installed capacity. These effects are mainly driven by the expansion of renewables and partially by a decrease in investments in fossil-fuel capacity. These regional effects imply a two-fold increase in the renewable energy share of Indonesia. We find no effects on manufacturing, a decline in mining activity accompanied by lower wages but no change in employment, and an increase in services employment, particularly in utilities. These results highlight the effectiveness of fiscal incentives in spurring capital-intensive infrastructure investments in developing countries and have implications for the role of renewable capacity expansion in regional development. |
| Keywords: | investment tax incentives, tax holidays, corporate income tax, renewable energy, investment, industrial policy |
| JEL: | H25 H30 L50 Q48 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12886 |
| By: | Philipp Barteska; Oliver Kim; Nathan Lane; Seung Joo Lee |
| Abstract: | How did geopolitics shape East Asia's economic development? We find that U.S. military procurement during the Vietnam War — a shock which peaked at nearly 3% of South Korean GDP, rivaling the Marshall Plan — catalyzed Korea's export-led industrialization. We construct a new firm-level dataset that matches Korean export records with U.S. procurement contracts awarded between 1965 and 1974 to estimate the causal impact of winning a contract on export performance. A firm winning its first contract raises its likelihood of exporting by 14.7 percentage points and its export value by 40%. Treated firms are more likely to expand into third-country markets and export manufacturing products — and these gains are unlikely to come from business stealing. Finally, we find that U.S. procurement and domestic industrial policy were likely complementary. Our findings reveal a neglected channel through which Cold War geopolitics shaped the East Asian economic miracle. |
| Keywords: | export promotion, firm development, East Asian Miracle, procurement, geoeconomics |
| JEL: | F14 F35 O14 H56 N45 O25 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12926 |
| By: | Quoc-Anh Do; Sebastian Ellingsen; Gedeon Lim |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the long-run impacts of diasporas on local economic development. We do so in the context of one of the most economically influential diasporas: the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. Our instrumental variables strategy exploits 15th-century landing sites on Java that shaped subsequent Chinese settlement but lost maritime access due to 17th-century silting. We find that a 1p.p. higher Chinese share in 1930 leads to 9.4% higher household consumption and 26% higher population today. These effects attenuate sharply during the 1997-1998 crisis, then recover. We find strong effects on firm sales driven by improved financing through local private networks but not through exports. We provide suggestive evidence for the key role of historical ethnic-trading networks within Java. Our findings suggest that despite their small size, ethnic minorities with durable complementarities can play an out-sized, positive role in local economic development. |
| Keywords: | diaspora, ethnic minority, immigration, ethnic segregation, conflict, discrimination, private finance, networks |
| JEL: | F63 N35 J15 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12893 |
| By: | Chawla, Parth |
| Abstract: | Do returns to human capital rise during crises? This paper examines whether human capital accumulation created by Indonesia’s INPRES school construction program in the 1970s improved firm resilience in the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. I find that each additional school per 1, 000 children increased real labor productivity and output during the crisis period by 2.7 and 3.3 percent, respectively. INPRESinduced changes in the local pre-crisis workforce composition that shifted workers toward more skill-intensive production work. I argue that these skills became particularly valuable during the crisis, when firms faced disruptions. Consistent with this mechanism, INPRES had larger effects in sectors with higher import intensity, where adjustment demands were greater. I show that the local abundance of skilled workers in high-INPRES districts kept wages relatively lower, enabling plants to retain more of them when they were most valuable. |
| Keywords: | International Development |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea26:404651 |
| By: | Ko Adachi (Bank of Japan); Kosuke Aoki (Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo); Yoshiyuki Kurachi (Bank of Japan); Taiki Ono (Bank of Japan); Akitoshi Toyoda (Bank of Japan) |
| Abstract: | This study employs firm-to-firm transaction data to identify the multilayered and extensive supply chain structures in Japan's manufacturing sector and quantitatively analyze the characteristics of these supply chain structures. It also investigates the impacts of firm-level shocks, arising from both the supply and demand sides, on the overall manufacturing sector. The analysis reveals that automobile supply chains are exceptionally long and large-scale, with firms at the center of these chains exerting a larger influence on individual suppliers' production activities than in other industries. Furthermore, the findings indicate that supply constraints in products identified as potential bottlenecks can significantly dampen macroeconomic production. The results also highlight that holding inventory can serve as an effective measure to mitigate these impacts to a certain extent. |
| Keywords: | Supply Chain; Firm-to-Firm Transaction Data; Network Centrality; Supply Constraints |
| JEL: | C67 L14 L16 |
| Date: | 2026–08–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boj:bojwps:wp26e13 |
| By: | Fang, Ming; Wang, Shuang |
| Abstract: | We investigate the role of informal institutions—specifically, clan culture—in facilitating agricultural land markets in the absence of robust formal property rights. Exploiting the staggered rollout of China's agricultural land certification program as a quasi-experiment, we analyze rural household land rental behavior. We document two main findings. First, villages with stronger clan networks exhibit significantly higher rates of land out-leasing, highlighting the protective role of informal cultural norms on land tenure security. Second, the policy-induced increase in land leasing— driven by the formalization of property rights—is substantially weaker in villages with strong pre-existing clan cultures. Our findings suggest a strong substitution effect between formal legal institutions and informal cultural norms, providing direct empirical evidence on the protective power of social capital in developing economies. |
| Keywords: | Institutional and Behavioral Economics |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea26:404430 |
| By: | Eunkyo Cho (Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade) |
| Abstract: | US-China competition has moved past its first round, a contest of trade and technology pressure fought over tariffs and core technologies, and is evolving into a race to capture the global AI ecosystem of the physical AI era and to set the standards for industrial architecture. China is pursuing three shifts in its AI and supply chain strategy. First, as the effectiveness of US export controls erodes, it is building both leverage over demand markets and a semiconductor ecosystem of its own. Second, as the only country that covers every branch of industry in the UN industrial classification, it is applying AI to upgrade even its traditional manufacturing sector, turning manufacturing as a whole into a strategic asset. Third, it is using physical AI to extend its manufacturing and process-based standards worldwide.<p> The second round of this competition calls for a Korean response that goes beyond a defensive diversification of supply chains. That response should center on three lines of action: building a K-manufacturing architecture that vertically integrates chokepoint assets with a manufacturing large language model (LLM) trained on the judgment data of demanding production processes; upgrading the K-materials industry by applying AI to traditional flagship industries; and pursuing the architectural assetization of K-manufacturing by binding Korea’s separate strengths in technology, production capacity, standards, and shop-floor data into a single asset system. The indispensable assets developed in this way should in turn support deeper strategic partnerships, ones in which Korea participates in the technology ecosystems of major economies as a co-designer rather than a component supplier. |
| Keywords: | US-China competition, supply chains, traditional manufacturing, physical AI, economic security |
| JEL: | F52 L60 O25 O33 |
| Date: | 2026–07–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:kietrp:023549 |
| By: | , KuoRayMao; Jin, Shuqin; Yu Hu; Weeks, Nefratiri; Ye, Liangjun |
| Abstract: | As industrialized animal agriculture expanded rapidly in the last decade, the resultant pollution has generated widespread despoliation of natural resources and environmental victimization in rural China. This study examines the formulation and implementation of national environmental regulations from 2014 to 2019 and finds that the juxtaposing ministerial and provincial jurisdictions resulted in conflicting interpretations of the scale and evaluation criteria of the national policy. We argue that the regulations are more than centralized conservation programs designed to reduce environmental pollution caused by the expansion of animal husbandry. Instead, these regulations are fundamentally state-led rural development initiatives that utilize the designations of ecological protection zones to reconfigure land use and promote scale-up production in agricultural structural adjustment initiatives. The enforcement of these environmental regulations, therefore, constitutes a treadmill of law (ToL) that accelerated the geographical specialization and function intensification of the Chinese husbandry sector. |
| Date: | 2026–07–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:k2zg6_v1 |
| By: | , KuoRayMao; Zhu, Yiliang; Zhao, Zhong; Yan, Shan |
| Abstract: | This chapter offers one of the first studies to examine critically the connection between deficiencies in China’s regulatory apparatus and the criminality associated with illegal dumping and trading of medical waste—specifically as it pertains to waste dumping in rural northwestern China. The authors begin with a brief review of green criminology’s approach to waste crime and summarise the literature on top-down environmental regulation enforcement in China. Next, they describe the development of the medical waste regulation framework and highlight the current obstacles to enforcement in China. The chapter then introduces a case study to illustrate how institutional incentives in the job performance evaluation system of bureaucrats resulted in the under-enforcement of medical waste regulations at the level of rural governance. Their chapter concludes by suggesting that to study environmental offenses in China, green criminologists must examine how the institutional practices of the fragmented bureaucracy shape the economic, political, and social contexts that have structured the complexity of environmental regulation enforcement in this illiberal and restrictive society. |
| Date: | 2026–07–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:45uh2_v1 |
| By: | Chiappori, Pierre-André; Meghir, Costas; Okuyama, Yoko |
| Abstract: | In this paper we develop a novel approach to measuring individual welfare within households, recognizing that individuals may have both different preferences (particularly regarding public consumption) and differential access to resources. We construct a money metric measure of welfare that accounts for public goods (by using personalized prices) and the allocation of time. We then use our conceptual framework to analyse intrahousehold inequality in Japan, allowing for the presence of two public goods: expenditures on children and other public goods including housing. We show empirically that women have much stronger preferences for both public goods and this has critical implications for the distribution of welfare in the household. |
| JEL: | H31 H42 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19194 |
| By: | Rounak Hande (xKDR Forum); Utkarsh Narain (xKDR Forum); Ajay Shah (xKDR Forum) |
| Abstract: | Accurate measurement of renewable energy capacity is a prerequisite for effective climate policy making. Yet, official statistics are rarely cross-validated against independent sources. Sound measurement helps policymakers meet globally-stated goals and guides the private sector in deploying capital. We compare solar and wind installed capacity from the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) against two independent sources: satellite imagery from Global Renewables Watch (GRW) and project-level data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) CAPEX database. For solar, GRW tracks CEA closely (95% as of January 2024) initially, but diverges by April 2026. The satellite estimate of 133 GW with a slight downward adjustment to account for non-operational plants likely represents true solar capacity in India as of April 2026. Wind estimates differ more substantially, with GRW reporting 122% of CEA capacity as of January 2024, likely reflecting higher turbine capacity factor assumptions. As of April 2026, CEA reports installed wind capacity of 56.4 GW. The CMIE CAPEX database accounts for roughly 48-75% of CEA-reported capacity for wind and solar respectively by April 2026, consistent with its role as a survey rather than a census, and indicative of sizeable unrecorded capacity. Our analysis establishes a benchmark to validate official statistics with alternative data. Additionally, we note that alternative sources like GRW and CMIE CAPEX can serve as valuable project-level resources supporting microeconomic research. |
| JEL: | Q42 Q43 Q48 O13 C82 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anf:wpaper:45 |