Border Industry in Myanmar: Turning the Periphery into the Center of Growth

The Myanmar economy has not been deeply integrated into East Asia’s production and distribution networks, despite its location advantages and notably abundant, reasonably well-educated, cheap labor force. Underdeveloped infrastructure, logistics in particular, and an unfavorable business and investment environment hinder it from participating in such networks in East Asia. Service link costs, for connecting production sites in Myanmar and other remote fragmented production blocks or markets, have not fallen sufficiently low to enable firms, including multi-national corporations to reduce total costs, and so the Myanmar economy has failed to attract foreign direct investments. Border industry offers a solution. The Myanmar economy can be connected to the regional and global economy through its borders with neighboring countries, Thailand in particular, which already have logistic hubs such as deep-sea ports, airports and trunk roads. This paper examines the source of competitiveness of border industry by considering an example of the garment industry located in the Myanmar-Thai border area. Based on such analysis, we recognize the prospects of border industry and propose some policy measures to promote this on Myanmar soil.

Has Low Productivity Constrained Competitiveness of African Firms? : Comparison of the Firm Performances with Asian Firms

It has been argued that poor productive performance is one of critical sources of stagnation of the African manufacturing sector, but firm-level empirical supports are limited. Using the inter-regional firm data of the garment industry, technical efficiency and its contribution to competitiveness measured as unit costs were compared between Kenyan and Bangladeshi firms. Our estimates indicated that there is no significant gap in the average technical efficiency of the two industries despite conservative estimation, although unit costs greatly differ between the two industries. Higher unit cost in Kenyan firms mainly stems from high labour cost, while impact of inefficiency is quite small. Productivity accounts little for the stagnation of garment industry in several African countries.

エチオピアの皮革産業の現状と展望

エチオピアでは，1991年に社会主義政権から新政権（EPRDF）へと政権が代わり，経済自由化政策が進められている。その影響は，コーヒーに次ぐ輸出産品である皮産業も例外ではない。産業活動の自由化によって，民間企業の参入が急増し，皮の国内価格も国際価格に大きな影響をうけるようになった。これによって，現在皮産業は活況を呈し，さらなる発展が見込まれるが，同時にさまざまな問題もはらんでいる。

The man with iron shoes : and other sermons to the junior congregation /

Mode of access: Internet.

Textiles manufacture, and other industries, in Keighley /

Mode of access: Internet.