Did East-Asian Developing Economies Lose Export Competitiveness in the Pre-Crisis 1990s?: Assessing East-Asian Export Performance from 1980 to 1996

Abstract

This ADB Institute study uses standard export indicators to determine (i) how export performance evolved during the emergence of the dynamic East-Asian trade-FDI nexus and (ii) whether successful trading economies were already starting to lose their competitiveness before the Asian crisis struck. Contrary to the belief that Asia’s emerging export machine was no longer a dominant force, we find that very few of these economies lost their export competitiveness prior to 1996. This also supports the view that the causes of the crisis could not be blamed on macroeconomic factors associated with a conventional current account crisis, since such factors would have been expected to have led to a loss in international competitiveness.