We define and measure firm product destination year specific export quality and investigate how quality competition from China affects Indonesian firm productivity in the domestic and export markets. Our results suggest that an increase in Chinese exported product quality by 10 percent will increase the productivity of Indonesian firms by 0.4-0.5 percent in Indonesia’s domestic market, and increase ...

The impacts of imports on the domestic labour market have been hotly debated recently. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effects of not only imports from China but also those under regional trade agreements (RTAs) on employment in Japan. As in previous studies in the literature, we found that the rise in import penetration from China significantly decreases employment in Japan. ...

Global trade is expected to suffer a significant contraction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Did the relative importance of countries in the world trade network change as a result of the pandemic? The answer to this question is particularly important for Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries because of their strong trade linkages with China, where the COVID-19 virus originated. ...

Understanding the role of international trade is the key to understanding China’s miraculous economic growth. This paper reviews the literature on international trade in the context of China, with a focus on processing trade, trade liberalisation, and firm performance to provide a better understanding of China’s experience of opening up over the past 4 decades.

Global value chains (GVCs) may have distributional consequences for the relative demand for skilled labour. This study relates GVC participation to the share of skilled labour in total compensation, focusing on the experience of 12 East Asian countries. It applies a macro-level analysis covering 114 countries and 27 sectors for intermittent years from 2001 to 2011. It uses a widely accepted measure ...

This study examines the impact of non-tariff measures (NTMs) on global value chain (GVC) participation and the underlying mechanisms. Our study employs a novel approach using an additional compliance requirement indicator as a relative proxy for NTMs to measure their impact on GVC participation. We conduct a cross-sectional analysis at the industry level, spanning 19 industrial sectors in 30 countries ...

In the East Asian context, previous studies showed that trade occurring through production networks remained relatively steady amidst an economic shock and recovered faster and stronger once the shock was over. Using finely disaggregated product-level monthly bilateral trade data, we examine whether network trade in the East Asian region has been robust and resilient in face of the COVID-19 crisis, ...

This paper assesses how the current COVID-19 pandemic is shaping global value chains in East Asia after the formidable disruptions inflicted by the health crisis. Some have expressed the view that global value chains would readjust and production processes would move home, i.e. reshoring, facilitated by the recent movement of protectionism measures in the post-pandemic world. We evaluate such concerns ...

Countries export less to destination countries with greater regulatory burdens. We use finely disaggregated product-level bilateral trade value and quantity data for 98 countries, together with a new data set of detailed information on technical regulations, to answer the following question: if a country is facing a greater regulatory burden in a particular destination market, is that country more ...