China's inter-regional spillover of carbon emissions and domestic supply chains

In this study, we apply the inter-regional input–output model to explain the relationship between China’s inter-regional spillover of CO2 emissions and domestic supply chains for 2002 and 2007. Based on this model, we propose alternative indicators such as the trade in CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions in trade, regional trade balances, and comparative advantage of CO2 emissions. The empirical results not only reveal the nature and significance of inter-regional environmental spillover within China’s domestic regions but also demonstrate how CO2 emissions are created and distributed across regions via domestic production networks. The main finding shows that a region’s CO2 emissions depend on not only its intra-regional production technique, energy use efficiency but also its position and participation degree in domestic and global supply chains.

Financing Small and Medium Enterprises in Myanmar

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) share the biggest part in Myanmar economy in terms of number, contribution to employment, output, and investment. Myanmar economic growth is thus totally dependent on the development of SMEs in the private sector. Today, the role of SMEs has become more vital in strengthening national competitive advantage and the speedy economic integration into the ASEAN region. However, studies show that SMEs have to deal with a number of constraints that hinder their development potential, such as the shortage in power supply, unavailability of long-term credit from external sources and many others. Among them, the financing problem of SMEs is one of the biggest constraints. Such is deeply rooted in demand and supply issues, macroeconomic fundamentals, and lending infrastructure of the country. The government’s policy towards SMEs could also lead to insufficient support for the SMEs. Thus, focusing on SMEs and private sector development as a viable strategy for industrialization and economic development of the country is a fundamental requirement for SME development. This paper recommends policies for stabilizing macro economic fundamentals, improving lending infrastructures of the country and improving demand- and supply-side conditions from the SMEs financing perspective in order to provide a more accessible financing for SMEs and to contribute in the overall development of SMEs in Myanmar thereby to sharpen national competitive advantage in the age of speedy economic integration.

Environmental consciousness, economic gain and consumer choice of energy efficient appliances in Thailand, China and India

In developing economies, consumption of electricity in residential and commercial sectors increased with economic development. In order to identify the factors for effective facilitation of standard and labeling programs, this article explores factors that affect consumer choice to energy-efficient products. Main findings are as follows: (1)Consumers in Thailand shows the highest awareness to environmental friendly concepts, followed by India and China.(2) Chosen labeled products include air-conditioners, TVs, refrigerators and washing machines, but not some popular products such as ceiling fans, electric fans or mobile phones. (3) Consumer who has higher energy conservation perception will buy energy efficient products.(4) Consumers in China, India and Thailand are sensitive to energy efficiency of products, primarily because they lead to less expenditure on electricity. (5) Labeling works to make levels of the energy efficiency of products more visible and thus helped consumers to choose the products.

Compilation, application and challenge of IDE-JETRO's International Input-Output tables

International input-output tables are among the most useful tools for economic analysis. Since these tables provide detailed information about international production networks, they have recently attracted considerable attention in research on spatial economics, global value chains, and issues relating to trade in value-added. The Institute of Developing Economies at the Japan External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO) has more than 40 years of experience in the construction and analysis of international input-output tables. This paper explains the development of IDE-JETRO’s multi-regional input-output projects including the construction of the Asian International Input-Output table and the Transnational Interregional Input-Output table between China and Japan. To help users understand the features of the tables, this paper also gives examples of their application.

Modeling for the world crude oil and natural gas markets

Crude oil and natural gas have been essential energy sources and play a crucial role in the world economy. Changes in energy prices significantly impact economic growth. This study builds an econometric model to illustrate the substitute relation between crude oil and natural gas markets. Additionally, the determination of the oil and natural gas prices are endogenized, assuming imperfect competition to reflect a real market strategy. Our empirical results show that the overall performance of this system is acceptable, and the model can be applied to policy analysis for determining monetary or energy policy by introducing this model to the more comprehensive system.

Myanmar's Economic Relations with China: Can China Support the Myanmar Economy?

Against the background of closer diplomatic, political and security ties between Myanmar and China since 1988, their economic relations have also grown stronger throughout the 1990s and up to 2005. China is now a major supplier of consumer and capital goods to Myanmar, in particular through border trade. China also provides a large amount of economic cooperation in the areas of infrastructure, energy and state-owned economic enterprises. Nevertheless, Myanmar’s trade with China has failed to have a substantial impact on its broad-based economic and industrial development. China’s economic cooperation apparently supports the present regime, but its effects on the whole economy will be limited with an unfavorable macroeconomic environment and distorted incentives structure. As a conclusion, strengthened economic ties with China will be instrumental in regime survival, but will not be a powerful force affecting the process of economic development in Myanmar.

Deprivation of Education in Urban Areas: A Basic Profile of Slum Children in Delhi, India

This paper showed the basic educational status of slum children between 5 and 14 years old. The attendance ratio of slum children is much lower than that of children in Delhi as a whole. Parental perception of education and financing education are the major constraints. Even if children are attending schools, the majority of them are over-aged. There are both demand and supply side reasons for discouraging slum children from attending schooling. As opposed to school-based surveys in previous literature, children in slums are more likely to go to government schools rather than low-fee paying private schools. Some policies are suggested.

Impacts of solar lanterns in geographically challenged locations : experimental evidence from Bangladesh

Despite continuous efforts to improve the coverage, the access to electricity remains insufficient in many developing countries, particularly in geographically challenged locations, due mostly to the high cost of grid extension. To rigorously investigate the effectiveness of solar products as an alternative in remote areas, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in river islands of northern Bangladesh where no grid-based electricity is available. We found that solar lanterns significantly increased home study hours among schooled children, especially in the night and before exams. School attendance rate also initially increases due to the provision of solar lamps, although such effects fade away over time. The increased study time and initial school attendance rate, however, did not improve children's exam results. We also found marginal improvements on health-related indicators, such as eye redness and irritation, but negligible impacts on respiratory indicators. Households that received solar lanterns substituted the traditional lighting sources with modern technology, leading to a significant decrease in annual biomass fuel consumptions, particularly kerosene. Finally, treated households showed a greater self-reported willingness to purchase solar products compared with the control group.

Formation of supply chain collaboration and firm performance in the Thai automotive and electronics industries

This paper examines factors that encourage firms to go into supply chain collaborations (SCC) and relationships between SCC and supply chain performances (SCP), using a questionnaire survey on Thai automotive and electronics industries in 2012. OLS regression results show firms established supplier evaluation and audit system, system of rewards for high-performance supplier and long-term transactions with their supply chain partners under a competitive pressure are more closely cooperate with these partners on information sharing and decision synchronization. Instrumental variables regression indicates SCC arisen from competitive pressure, supplier evaluation and audit, a system of rewards for high-performance supplier and long-term relationship causally influence SCP such as on-time delivery, responsiveness to fast procurement, flexibility to customer need, and profit.

Supply chain collaboration and responsiveness : a comparison between Thai automotive and electronics industries

This paper examines factors that promote firms to develop supply chain collaborations (SCC) with their partners and relationships between SCC and supply chain operational performances (SCOP), using a questionnaire survey on Thai automotive and electronics industries in 2012. This paper also carries out a comparative study on these questions between the electronics and automotive industries. Two-stage least squares (2SLS) regressions verifY that supplier evaluation and audit is a foundation for firms to share information and synchronize decision makings with their partners, and that such SCC are significantly related to SCOP indictors such as on-time delivery, fast procurement, and flexibility to customer need irrespective of industry type. On the other hand, competitive pressure motivates only electronics firms to develop sec in order to be more innovative.

Does market upgrading benefit farmers? : market differentiation, contract farming, and professional cooperatives in China's pork processing industry

This study tested whether contract farming or farmers professional cooperatives (FPCs) improved the social benefit of pork production and income of breeding farmers in China. The main concern of this study is whether institutional arrangement like contract farming or FPCs actually improved the welfare of farmers as expected. To answer this question accurately, we estimated the differentiated market demand of pork products in order to quantify the benefit by transaction types. Our study finds that contract farming or FPCs improved the benefits of pork products, but farmer's income remained lower than that of traditional transaction types. This finding is new in terms of quantifying distribution of the economic values among sales outlets, agro-firms and farmers. It is more reliable because it explicitly captures impacts from both demand side and supply side by structural estimation. In practice, we need to keep it mind the bargaining power of small farmers will not improve instantly even when the contract farming or FPCs are introduced.

Procyclical Productivity and Returns-to-Scale in Philippine Manufacturing

The Philippines is regarded as a highly oligopolistic economy, and it is argued that this is a cause of the relative stagnation of the economy to neighbouring East Asian economies. This presumption might be associated with increasing returns to scale and market power, which are consistent with the procyclical total factor productivity that is observed in the Philippines and the United States. However, this study found no strong evidence supporting increasing returns for aggregate manufacturing and three-digit manufacturing industries during 1956-1980 in the Philippines, based on data constructed by Hooley (1985). Further, this study does not support external effect discussed in Caballero and Lyons (1992).

Infrastructure Development of Railway in Cambodia: A Long Term Strategy

Infrastructure development means for the making of living environment, transport and communications, disaster prevention and national land conservation, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and energy production and supply. Transport infrastructure development in Cambodia involved with (1) road, (2) railway, (3) port, inland-water way and (4) aviation. All model of transport infrastructure have special different kinds of importance. Railway is different from other base important of railways are transport passengers and traffic freight especially transport for heavy goods in huge capacity and in long distance by safer and faster. Transport in Cambodia for traffic freight export import base from Thailand and other via Sisophon and Shihanoukvill port. Traffic is increasing rapidly during nowadays railway condition in adequate of demand required. This is why Railway is selected as the topic of this paper to prevent monopoly of road transport. This paper, does review about infrastructure development plan for Railway in Cambodia as a long term strategy by review and analysis forecast on the previous performance of Royal Railways of Cambodia (RRC) transport traffic involved with condition of infrastructure development of railway in Cambodia. And also review the plan of development RRC but just only detail a plan of rehabilitation that is immediately needed. Suggest some recommendation at the last part. As Cambodia is a member country of ASEAN and also Mekong sub-region. For make sure that transport networks work effectively with a progress of economic integration, we make clear what is important for infrastructure development of railway in Cambodia from the standpoint of the development plan of Mekong sub-region. This paper is organized by 4 sections. Section 1 review about Infrastructure Development of Railway in Cambodia (IDRC) Historical Background, Follow by Section 2 will review the Current Situation of IDRC and some analysis of transport performance from previous years, Then Section 3 review of the focusing on traffic transport of RRC in the future, Section 4 review Infrastructure Development of Railway in Cambodia Future plans in long term; at last conclusion and recommendation. In section 1 does review history background of RRC from the rail first begun. But why is needed to review? Because of history background is involved infrastructure development of RRC in present time. History background made big gaps constraint and obstacle for socioeconomic development and poverty reduction, also left Cambodia with tragedy and left developed behind. After that remain infrastructure development needs huge fund and long time for restoration, reconstruction, rehabilitation and development into new technology as most of world practice.