Smuggling and import duties in Myanmar

This paper examines the effects of import duties on smuggling in Myanmar. Following Fisman and Wei (2004), the reporting discrepancies between Myanmar’s imports records and corresponding exports recorded by trading partners are regarded as indicative of smuggling. The paper studies whether reporting discrepancies differ across trading partners as well as across time. Our main findings are first, that the hike in import duties in June 2004 helped to widen the reporting discrepancies, which suggests smuggling for tax evasion purposes and second, that reporting discrepancies differ considerably across trading partners: land borders appear to be particularly attractive venues for smugglers.

Dangerous unions : mapping human smuggling and human trafficking in international marriage through Japan's legal response

This working paper explores human smuggling and human trafficking through international marriage. It focuses on Japan's criminal justice response, while examining the major stakeholders involved in this activity. The paper focuses on the time period from 2008-2013. International marriages, particularly commercially brokered arrangements, have rapidly increased throughout East and Southeast Asia, with more women from less developed countries moving to richer destinations. The increasing prevalence of brokered marriages, and the overall numbers of marriage migrants, provides cover for criminal organizations to smuggle labor migrants on false marriages, and to send some migrants into what are clearly human trafficking situations.

Evaluation of Non-Survey International IO Construction Methods with the Asian-Pacific Input-Output Table

This paper presents four non-survey methods to construct a full-information international input-output table from national IO tables and international import and export statistics, and this paper tests these four methods against the semi-survey international IO table for nine East-Asian countries and the USA, which is constructed by the Institute of Developing Economies in Japan. The tests show that the impact on the domestic flows of using self-sufficiency ratios is small, except for Singapore and Malaysia, two countries with large volumes of smuggling and transit trade. As regards the accuracy of the international flows, all methods show considerable errors, of 10%-40% for commodities and of 10%-70% for services. When more information is added, i.e. going from Method 1 to 4, the accuracy increases, except for Method 2 that generally produces larger errors than Method 1. In all, it seems doubtful whether replacing the semi-survey Asian-Pacific IO table with one of the four non-survey tables is justified, except when the semi-survey table itself is also considered to be just another estimate.

Trade policies and trade mis-reporting in Myanmar

While the trade statistics of Myanmar show surpluses for 2007 through 2010, the corresponding statistics of trade partner countries indicate deficits. Such discrepancies in mirror trade statistics are analyzed in connection with the ‘export-first and import-second’ policy provisioning import permissions on permission applicants possessing a sufficient amount of the export-tax-deducted export earnings. Under this policy, the recorded imports and exports of the private sector have been maintaining equilibrium, whereas discrepancies in the mirror statistics have fluctuated. This suggests that traders adjusted mis-reporting in accordance with the supply and demand of the export earnings.