Evolution in the Concept of Development: How Has The World Bank's Legal Assistance Extended its Reach?

The World Bank's legal and judicial reforms programs have expanded considerably since it began to address the issue of governance in the early 1990s. Initially the Bank focused on legal reforms for inducing private investment. Currently, its legal assistance extends to include the criminal justice sector. Such activities cannot be directly construed from its Articles of Agreement. This paper will discuss how the Bank interpreted its Articles in order to ligitimize its expanding activities. The Bank has manoeuvred itself into the criminal justice sector by skillfully changing its concept of development without deviating from its mandate. The change can be described as an 'evolution' which has allowed the Bank to identify any area as target for its development assistance.

How are global value chains fragmented and extended in China's domestic production networks?

Global value chains are supported not only directly by domestic regions that export goods and services to the world market, but also indirectly by other domestic regions that provide parts, components, and intermediate services to final exporting regions. In order to better understand the nature of a country’s position and degree of participation in global value chains, we need to more fully examine the role of individual domestic regions. Understanding the domestic components of global supply chains is especially important for large developing countries like China and India, where there may be large variations in economic scale and development between domestic regions. This paper proposes a new framework for measuring domestic linkages to global value chains. This framework measures domestic linkages by endogenously embedding a country’s domestic interregional input-output (IO) table in an international IO model. Using this framework, we can more clearly describe how global production is fragmented and extended through linkages across a country’s domestic regions. This framework will also enable us to estimate how value added is created and distributed in both domestic and international segments of global value chains. For examining the validity and usefulness of this new approach, some numerical results are presented and discussed based on the 2007 Chinese interregional IO table, China customs statistics at the provincial level, and World Input-Output Tables (WIOTs).

Is FTA/EPA effective for a developing country to attract FDI? : simulation analysis based on an extended knowledge-capital model

To prepare an answer to the question of how a developing country can attract FDI, this paper explored the factors and policies that may help bring FDI into a developing country by utilizing an extended version of the knowledge-capital model. With a special focus on the effects of FTAs/EPAs between market countries and developing countries, simulations with the model revealed the following: (1) Although FTA/EPA generally ends to increase FDI to a developing country, the possibility of improving welfare through increased demand for skilled and unskilled labor becomes higher as the size of the country declines; (2) Because the additional implementation of cost-saving policies to reduce firm-type/trade-link specific fixed costs ends to depreciate the price of skilled labor by saving its input, a developing country, which is extremely scarce in skilled labor, is better off avoiding the additional option; (3) If a country hopes to enjoy larger welfare gains with EPA, efforts to increase skilled labor in the country, such as investing in education, may be beneficial.

Compilation of a regionally-extended inter-country input-output table and its application to global value chain analysis

Studies on the rise of global value chains (GVCs) have attracted a great deal of interest in the recent economics literature. However, due to statistical and methodological challenges, most existing research ignores domestic regional heterogeneity in assessing the impact of joining GVCs. GVCs are supported not only directly by domestic regions that export goods and services to the world market, but also indirectly by other domestic regions that provide parts, components, and intermediate services to final exporting regions. To better understand the nature of a country's position and degree of participation in GVCs, we need to fully examine the role of individual domestic regions. Understanding the domestic components of GVCs is especially important for larger economies such as China, the US, India and Japan, where there may be large variations in economic scale, geography of manufacturing, and development stages at the domestic regional level. This paper proposes a new framework for measuring domestic linkages to global value chains. This framework measures domestic linkages by endogenously embedding a target country's (e.g. China and Japan) domestic interregional input–output tables into the OECD inter-country input–output model. Using this framework, we can more clearly understand how global production is fragmented and extended internationally and domestically.