The Iron and Steel Industry in Asia: Development and Restructuring

The paper examines the development and restructuring of the iron and steel industry in Asian countries. Studying countries that have integrated steelworks with large blast furnaces (South Korea, Taiwan, China and India) and countries without (Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia), the paper shows the difference in the development processes across the countries and across time, and points to the diversity of the development experience of these countries. The paper argues that significant differences in steel production technologies in terms of initial investment and minimum-efficient scale, the changing role of the state, and shifting demand structures in the domestic steel markets of each country have been the important factors that led to the differences in the development path of the steel industry in each country.

Product quality and intra-industry trade

In this study, we argue that the conventional intra-industry trade (IIT) index does not address the quality issue directly and propose a methodology to make full use of unit-price gap information to deduce quality differences between simultaneously exported and imported products. By applying this measure to German trade data at the eight-digit level, we study the quality improvement of Chinese export goods in its IIT with Germany. We compare the case of China with those of Eastern European countries, which are also major trading partners of Germany. Our results show that the unit-value difference in IIT between Germany and Eastern European countries is clearly narrowing. However, China's export prices to Germany are much lower than Germany's export prices to China, and this gap has not narrowed over the last 23 years. This is at odds with the common perception that China's product quality has improved, as documented by Rodrik (2006) and Schott (2008). Our results support Xu (2010), which argued that incorporating the quality aspect of the exported goods weakens or even eliminates the evidence of the sophistication of Chinese export goods in Rodrik (2006).

Agglomeration Economies in Japan: Technical Efficiency, Growth and Unemployment

This paper examines if the effects of agglomeration economies get manifested in technical efficiency and generate faster economic growth and higher (lower) levels of employment (unemployment). Using the prefecture level data for each of the two-digit groups of industries in Japan, the paper estimates region-specific technical efficiency index based on the stochastic frontier production function framework. The results of the factor analysis show that in most of the industry-groups (with a few exceptions) efficiency has a positive association with external scale variable(s). Though the relationship is not seen to be very strong, it would be equally erroneous to ignore the effect of agglomeration economies on efficiency. In the case of some of the light goods industries the agglomeration effect is relatively stronger. Further, economic growth varies positively with external scale variable(s) and unemployment rate tends to fall with respect to growth and concentration. All this tends to suggest that measures against industrial concentration may be counter-productive, particularly in the context of globalisation when countries are in dire need of raising productivity.

Competitiveness of the knitwear industry in Bangladesh : a study of industrial development amid global competition

This paper assesses the technical efficiency and profitability of the knitwear industry in Bangladesh taking into account the sector’s role in poverty reduction. While stochastic frontier analysis was invoked to assess technical efficiency, three alternative measures, namely the rate of return, total factor productivity and the Solow residual, were used to gauge the extent and determinants of the profitability of the industry based on firm-level data collected in 2001. The estimation results indicate the high profitability of the knitwear firms. In Bangladesh, the dynamic development of the industry has entailed great diversity in efficiency in comparison with the garment industries of other developing countries. While there is a significant scale effect in profitability and productivity, no supporting evidence was found for the positive impact on competitiveness of industrial upgrading in terms of usage of expensive machinery and vertical integration and industrial agglomeration.

Delegation to workers across countries and industries : social capital and coordination needs matter

The degree of delegating authority to non-managerial and non-supervisory workers substantially varies across countries and industries. By examining worker-level data from 14 countries, I empirically explain this variation by region-specific social capital that proxies workers' degree of self-centeredness and the industry-specific need for coordination. The empirical results of this study confirm the theoretical predictions by Alonso et al. (2008) for the first time: the negative association between coordination needs and decentralization is mitigated in regions with lower self-centeredness of workers. In particular, when self-centeredness of workers (respectively, need for coordination) is very low, the degree of delegation is always high regardless of the level of the need for coordination (self-centeredness of workers). Positive associations between delegation and its benefits, including job satisfaction, wages (proxy for higher productivity), and skill upgrading of workers, are also found. These results imply that people's degree of self-centeredness affects a country's economic development patterns by changing the degree of decentralization and its benefits.