ASEAN Manufactured Exports: Performance and revealed comparative advantage

Abstract

Rapid rates of economic growth in most of the ASEAN1 countries in the past two decades have been based in part on a vigorous indus trialization programme. The initial emphasis in industrialization strategies, in the 1950s and 1960s, was on import substitution. Even Singa pore, the most outward-looking economy, ex perienced a brief and mild period of import substitution in the 1960s. Beginning in the 1960s, however, new strategies were adopted which increasingly emphasized the goal of ex port-oriented industrialization. In many cases the changes hardly constituted a thorough re view of policies and priorities. But the common feature of the rethink was a commitment to expand manufactured exports. In Singapore the changes date from the rnid-1960s; in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand they occurred around 1970; while in Indonesia the goal of increased manufactured exports was not considered seriously until the early 1980s.2 The reasons for this policy reorientation are well known and need not be recounted in any detail here. Three factors especially appear to have been especially significant. The first and most important was disappointment at the generally poor record of import substitution. The earlier policies failed to generate sus tained manufacturing output and employment growth, nor did import replacement spill over into the export market, as initially antici pated.3 The second factor was the spectacular success of the Northeast Asian NICs (and Singapore) in achieving rapid growth and im proved distribution through export-led indus trialization, encouraged, until the mid-1970s, by an increasingly liberal international trading environment. Thirdly, there was a change in the intellectual climate towards greater em phasis on exports, hastened by a large number of developing country studies of trade and in dustrialization sponsored by the OECD in the 1960s and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the 1970s.4 A fourth factor, of particular significance in Indonesia in the early 1980s, was declining real commodity (especially petroleum) prices and the con sequent need to develop alternative export sources.