China＇s Trade Acceleration and the Deepening of an East Asian Regional Production Network

China＇s recent surge in trade has been associated with its deepening but contrasting trade relations with its two groups of key trading partners. On the one hand, China＇ s trade surpluses with the USA and the EU have risen rapidly, reaching US$144bn and US$91bn in 2006, respectively. On the other hand, China is importing heavily from its Asian neighbors. This diverging pattern of trade relations between China and its main trading partners reflects the continuous expansion and intensification of a complex cross-border production network in Asia, particularly for consumer electronics. In the process of deepening manufacturing sharing, China serves as an essential export platform for firms headquartered in the more advanced economies. These firms export intermediate goods from the relatively more advanced Asian economies to their affiliates in China where these inputs are assembled and then shipped to key export markets, including primarily the USA and the EU. One apparent outcome of the growing processing and assembly trade is the increased interdependency among Asian economies, which are now more dependent on each other than ever. It has also led to substantial structural changes and technological upgrading in China＇ s traded goods.     

Ties Binding Asia,Europe and the USA

We investigate changes in Asia's regional and global trade linkages and their influence on macroeconomic relationships among Asia, Europe and the USA. We first document changes in tripartite trade patterns and discuss stylized facts about East Asia's trade structure, with particular focus on the role of China. China plays a critical role in the rapidly expanding intra‐Asian trade as an assembly and production center that supplies final goods for the advanced economies. However, China's trade shares in final goods with East Asia and in parts and components with Europe and the USA are rising, suggesting that the region's production chains are becoming increasingly integrated into the global business network. Empirical results from a panel vector autoregression model generally confirm increasingly mutual macroeconomic interdependence among East Asia, Europe and the USA. The findings suggest a future role for Asia as an important trade partner and balancing power in the world economy.     

How growth deceleration in the PRC affects other Asian economies

Developing Asia has benefited greatly from the rise of the People's Republic of China (PRC), primarily through the trade channel. The PRC and its neighbours have collectively formed a regional production network, and the PRC is becoming an increasingly important source of final demand. Two empirical techniques are used to examine the likely economic impact of growth deceleration in the PRC on other Asian economies: (1) a single‐equation approach that captures the trade channel; and (2) a global vector autoregressive model that captures the effects beyond the trade channel. The results of both analyses confirm that deceleration in the PRC will have a non‐negligible negative effect on other economies, especially on East and Southeast Asian economies. An out‐of‐sample analysis to tease out the effects of slower growth in the PRC from the recent growth performance of selected Southeast Asian economies suggests that the PRC effect is contributing to the growth dynamics of this region but is not always dominant.     

Analysis on CO2 Emissions Transferred from Developed Economies to China through Trade

Based on a global input–output model, this paper investigates the CO₂ emission transfer between China and developed economies through trade. The results show that approximately 15–23 percent of China's production‐based emissions during 1995–2009 were induced by the production of goods and services satisfying final demand in developed economies. Decomposition of emission transfers shows that trade of intermediate products played a significant role in emission transfer from developed economies to China. Most developed economies have consumption‐based emission responsibilities that are higher than their production‐based responsibilities, whereas China's consumption‐based responsibility is significantly lower than its production‐based responsibility. We argue that a fair and efficient carbon accounting approach should take CO emission transfers from developed economies to developing economies into consideration. It is important that China and its developed trade partners cooperate in reducing emission transfers.     

当前全球贸易失衡的机制及中国的地位分析

美国的巨额贸易逆差与中国的巨额贸易顺差是当前全球贸易失衡的突出表现,更是以美国为代表的发达国家与以中国为代表的新兴市场经济体在当前世界经济格局及全球生产分工体系中的地位的集中体现,是"美国贸易模式"与"东亚贸易模式"冲突的必然结果。迅速发展的中国是当前世界经济格局中的重要力量,但中国在贸易商品结构、贸易流向结构及贸易利得分配格局中的表现表明,中国在当前全球贸易失衡中充当了贸易模式冲突的突破口的作用,国民福利不增反减,中国应该深刻解读"东亚贸易模式"对中国经济发展的作用,探索更科学、优化的外向型经济发展之路,引导世界经济向更均衡、更健康的方向发展。     

Asia's contribution to global rebalancing

Developing Asia remains at the core of global payment imbalances. While the geographical concentration of current account imbalances is significant—with the People's Republic of China accounting for the lion's share of the region's current account surplus—how Asia contributes to global rebalancing also depends critically on the newly industrialising economies and larger Association of Southeast Asian Nations economies. Given the region's huge diversity, the necessary national macroeconomic and structural policies will vary significantly across Asia's emerging economies. Whereas near‐term rebalancing efforts will be driven primarily by macroeconomic and exchange rate policies, structural reforms are essential for boosting domestic and regional demand as sources of economic growth over medium to long‐term. We argue that regional rebalancing will depend critically on the adoption of deeper and more comprehensive structural reforms and further trade liberalisation to unlock the potential of strong domestic and regional spending—thus reducing Asia's high dependence on extra‐regional demand. Priority policies should include infrastructure spending, competition, trade, financial development, investment, immigration, and other social policies to reduce national savings.     

Openness,Regional Trade Agreements and Growth: Evidence from Asia*

This paper assesses the relationship between regional trade agreements, trade integration and economic growth in 21 South and South‐East Asian countries over the period from 1980 to 2004. We aim to answer the following questions. First, how does the trade policy of a given country (and countries within the same region) affect a nation's domestic growth? Second, should developing economies in South and South‐East Asia engage in regional trade agreements (RTA) or move towards broad liberalization? Our results show that openness of either a single country or of its neighbors does not affect a nation's growth and that the impacts of RTA are unclear (if not detrimental to growth in some cases, once endogeneity is accounted for). Panel Granger‐causality tests running from openness to growth yield mixed results and some conclusions depend on the particular subsample under scrutiny.     

Did APEC's Trade Facilitation Action Plans deliver the goods?

This paper uses new data to examine whether APEC achieved its aim of reducing trade transaction costs by 10% over the 2002–2010 period. An inversion of the familiar gravity model makes it possible to infer trade costs based on the observed pattern of trade and production across economies. Analysis of trade costs calculated in this way shows that although intra- and extra-APEC trade costs fell during the sample period, they did not do so substantially more quickly than elsewhere in the world. Indeed, the region taken as a whole did not meet the 10% reduction goal. However, a considerable number of individual economies not only met the goal, they greatly exceeded it. Consistent with their outward oriented development strategies and leverage of global and regional value chains, some APEC economies saw very rapid falls in their trade costs over the 2002–2010 period, Viet Nam being a standout performer. Overall, about one third of the forum's membership for which consistent data are available met or exceeded the 10% reduction goal. APEC's two Trade Facilitation Action Plans can therefore be seen as having had mixed records of success.     

Asian trade: long‐term patterns and key policy issues

Fragmentation‐based specialisation has become an integral part of the economic landscape of East Asia. Dependence on this new form of international specialisation is proportionately larger in East Asia, in particular in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, than in North America and Europe. In this regard, an important recent development has been the rapid integration of China into regional production networks. This development is a counterpoint to the popular belief that China's global integration would crowd out other countries' opportunities for international specialisation. The rise of product fragmentation has strengthened the case for a global, rather than a regional, approach to trade and investment policymaking. Given the global orientation of the region's economies, we question whether there would be a significant benefit from current efforts to promote regional cooperation, unless the principle of ‘open regionalism’ is recognised. With both the Doha Round and APEC floundering, this is one of the major multilateral policy challenges of our time.     

东亚生产网络发展及其与外部市场关系考察

东亚生产网络的内在机制可以由二维分散生产理论给出一定的解释。依据该理论,作者的考察结果表明:生产网络的出现改变了东亚地区的贸易模式,引起区域内各经济体之间相互贸易的放大效应。但是,东亚生产网络的发展并没有使其与世界经济脱钩,特别是其出口的最终需求仍然高度依赖外部市场。     

中国在东亚地区贸易结构中的地位和作用——基于零部件贸易的研究

本文从零部件贸易的角度分析了中国在东亚贸易结构中的地位。文中计算了中国和其他东亚经济体1992～2005年的零部件贸易额,在大量事实数据的基础上得出结论:中国在东亚地区以零部件进口为主,而与区域外市场之间以最终产品出口为主。同时,随着中国经济逐渐融入到东亚地区的生产网络中,东亚地区的"三角贸易"模式发生了转变:中国成为东亚地区的出口平台,进口来自于区域内较发达经济体的中间产品零部件,进行装配加工后将最终产品销往区域外市场。     

垂直分工、技术转移与东亚区域生产整合:中国视角

本文利用高度细分的贸易数据,在合理分类的基础上分析了中国在东亚区域生产中整合过程的国际分工地位和特点,以及中国高技术产品贸易对外资的高度依赖性,进而总结了东亚生产和贸易模式的变化和中国在新三角贸易中的主导作用。     

Pacific Economic Co-operation:

The rapid growth of East Asian exports in the 1980s led to rising trade tensions. Trading partners, especially in the USA and Europe, tended to overlook the substantial growth of East Asia's imports (especially raw materials and capital equipment), focusing only on its capture of market shares in products for which US and EC manufacturers no longer held a comparative advantage. There is considerable interest in economic regionalism, raising concern about the division of the world economy into discriminatory trade blocs. In most economies around the Pacific, there is wide appreciation of the region's overwhelming interest in the maintenance of an open world trading system based on the non-discrimination principle of the GATT. Among initiatives for bilateral and regional trade liberalization in recent years, the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum offers perhaps the best prospect of co-operative promotion of these objectives. APEC, established in 1989, already includes fifteen economies from both sides of the Pacific accounting for over half of world production. APEC's guiding principles stipulate that co-operation should be outward-looking, building consensus on a gradually broader range of economic issues. This paper proposes four pragmatic options in areas for useful co-operation:

• ? Improving market access by reducing barriers to trade, such as the heavy protection of some parts of Northeast Asian agriculture, and of textiles and some other manufactures in major OECD countries.
• ? Reducing uncertainty about future market access: for example, agreement to streamline dispute settlement procedures could reduce resort to arbitrary or discriminatory measures to deal with trade tensions.
• ? Reducing physical bottlenecks , such as shortfalls in infrastructure, ranging from harbours to telecommunications, which impede trade in goods and also in services such as tourism.
• ? Harmonizing domestic legislation and rules , such as those relating to safety, quality and environmental standards.

It will not be easy to realize the economic gains from nondiscriminatory trade liberalization. But progress should be possible in some sectors where complementarity among APEC economies is obvious, as in mineral processing, where original reasons for protection have been weakened by changing circumstances, and where natural resource endowments and transport costs limit effective competition from outside the region. Regional initiatives will need to be non-discriminatory in order to avoid creating needless divisions in the world trading system. Preferential or discriminatory trading arrangements that fragment the multilateral world trading system constitute a threat to the Pacific region's economic prosperity. In contrast, this paper recommends an evolutionary approach: seeks early consensus on less contentious issues in order to build the sense of trust required for more effective future co-operation among economies on both sides of the Pacific, without discrimination against economies outside the region.     

Processing trade,exchange rates and China's bilateral trade balances

This paper analyzes the role of processing trade in China's bilateral trade balances and the impact of the yuan's appreciation on China's processing trade. The analysis is based on panel data covering bilateral processing trade between China and its partners from 1993 to 2008. The empirical results show that: (1) processing trade accounted for 100% of China's annual trade surplus during the period; (2) China's processing trade showed a significant regional bias—77% of processing imports originated from East Asia while only 29% of processing exports was destined to the region in 2008; and (3) a real appreciation of the yuan would negatively affect both processing imports and exports—specifically, a 10% real appreciation of the yuan would reduce not only China's processing exports by 9.1% but also its processing imports by 5.0%. Based on these empirical findings we conclude that the combined effect of the yuan's appreciation on the balance of processing trade and thus China's overall trade balance will be limited.     

Assessing the trade impacts of the ASEAN + 6 FTA for Lao PDR

Using an unbalanced panel dataset of bilateral exports from 1992 to 2009, we assess the potential trade impacts of the expansion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to ASEAN + 3 and ASEAN + 6 on the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). It is found that bilateral exports are positively related to overall bilateral country size and similarity in country size but inversely related to the factor endowment differences, transportation costs, and import tariffs. Simulation results show that the formation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) between ASEAN and the Plus‐6 economies (the People's Republic of China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea in East Asia; and the other three economies of Australia, India, and New Zealand) could increase bilateral trade between the Lao PDR and ASEAN + 6 by US$1 billion, and ASEAN + 3 by US$981 million. Nonetheless, the trade balance of the Lao PDR is likely to worsen in both the ASEAN + 3 and ASEAN + 6 PTAs because they stimulate more imports than exports.     

Trade integration and business cycle co-movements: the case of Korea with other Asian countries

As Korea increases its trade within Asia, it is becoming more and more integrated with the other economies in the region. Theoretically, increased trade can lead business cycles across trading partners to be patterned in either direction, towards convergence or divergence. By using data for 12 Asian economies, this paper finds that intra-industry trade is the major channel by which the business cycle of Korea becomes synchronized with that of other Asian economies, although increased trade itself does not necessarily lead to close business cycle coherence.     

Implications for Laos' development of its increasing regional integration and Chinese influence

This paper addresses the effects of regional integration in Laos, with a focus on China. Laos has recorded impressive growth over the past decade but remains one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia. The paper examines Laos' position within the region and traces changes in its situation, particularly its evolving relationship with China, by analysing its changing trade and investment relationships with China and the two other important neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam. The paper draws implications about what these changes will mean for Laos' development trajectory.     

Japan's economic slowdown and its global implications: a review of the economic modelling

Despite its role as a driver of global economic growth through the 1970s, in recent decades the rise of China has seen the international importance of Japan's economic performance recede from the public discourse. This is notwithstanding its continuing key role as economic partner to both industrial and developing countries and changes in its economic performance that would otherwise be a matter for global concern. In particular, the tendency for the Japanese economy and its external trade to stagnate not only has immediate consequences for global performance but also foreshadows a path to industrial transition for other key Asian economies. This paper reviews quantitative studies of Japan's performance. It identifies a paucity of results addressing global implications and suggests new research in this direction.     

European Integration and Australian Manufacturing Industry: The Case of Philips Electronics, 1960s–1970s

The creation of the Common Market in the European Community required electronics multinational Philips to integrate production operations across European countries. This effort had consequences for its Australian subsidiary. Rather than become a regional Philips hub with the support of its parent, as intended in the 1960s, it was absorbed by addressing changes in Australian trade policy and increased Japanese imports. The parent company's establishment of regional supply centres in Europe and Asia left no role for the small Australian production facilities in the company's global structure. Production and employment at Philips Australia were scaled back drastically during the 1970s.     

Understanding FDI and production networks in East Asia

We provide evidence from the electronics industry in East Asia supporting Kojima's (1973) hypothesis that FDI moves from capital‐exporting countries' disadvantaged industries into host countries' advantaged industries. These results imply that FDI and trade are complementary, unlike in Mundell's (1957) model where they are substitutes. The results also indicate that exchange rate volatility deters trade, implying that reductions in the service link costs between production blocks can promote fragmentation. These findings imply that host countries in East Asia can receive technology transfers by lowering service link costs.