Shigeyuki Abe: This paper explores numerically the dependence of ASEAN-5 on their growth engines, i.e., the United States, EU, Japan, China, and India. A structural VAR model is used to find such dependence. The growth multiplier effects results show that the United States is still the largest growth engine, China has overtaken Japan, and India needs more time to be a significant engine. These results agree generally with common sense.The paper explains nicely the past and current patterns of trade of ASEAN-5 and concurrently remarks that complexity of trade structure in terms of intermediate and final products underestimates the importance of the United States and overestimates that of China at the outset.If the authors consider such over- and under-estimations are important, it is imperative to divide exports into intermediate products and final goods rather than treating exports as a total and applying the same method to empirically find the differences. One can refer to Ando and Kimura (2005), for instance, for the exact Harmonized System trade classifications of intermediate goods. The meaning of export share also needs to be discussed. It does not differentiate its components. The percentage in 1990 and that in 2010 should be interpreted differently because the compositions of exports should be different. More advanced products are traded in 2010 compared with those in 1990; 10 percent in 2010 quite likely means more than 10 percent in 1990.A structural VAR model is a smart model but cannot tell us much about the linkages of many important variables. In this model, GDP growth is explained by export shares only. This aspect of the model is the cause of results that go against common sense; the multiplier effects of the growth engines on the Philippines are the lowest, for example. The Philippines is a part of the production network in Asia and its importance as playing a part in supply chains cannot be underestimated. In addition, the Philippines is known as remittance and call-center country. Such activities cannot be captured by trade shares alone. The real linkages with the United States should be quite large if we add contributions of migrant workers and call-center business.The characteristics of East Asia's supply chain is, as illustrated by Figure 2, that China imports intermediate goods from ASEAN, Asian NIEs, and Japan and assembles parts and exports final goods to the United States, EU, and Japan. Here one should note the linkage of Japan and China. The authors conclude that Japan lost the largest ground over the past three decades as a growth engine for ASEAN-5. This needs to be closely checked again because Japan affects China from the start. Japan-China-ASEAN-5 linkages should be shown explicitly.The gap between the model and reality is huge. Thus, some policy suggestions drawn by the model experiments need to be duly evaluated. Three policy suggestions from the authors to note are: “New policy initiatives are needed to help ASEAN strategically balance the rising overdependence on China and to manage U.S. participation in the Asian regional economic grouping.”“ASEAN-5 should aim to increase trade and investment linkages with the most future potentials; i.e., India-Indonesia-Singapore, Australia-India, and Japan-Indonesia-Singapore.”“ASEAN-5 should aim to attract some of the Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong labor-intensive industries to relocate from China to ASEAN to produce for the United States, EU, Japan, India, and ASEAN markets.”The first suggestion is warranted because overdependence on China and strong U.S. dependence is the reality. But the second policy suggestion does require more reasoning. Australia is not included in the model and the potentials of others are not fully discussed either. The third is most controversial. All ASEAN-5 governments are eager to upgrade their industrial structure and they no longer enhance labor-intensive industries.Finally, we should be aware that most products traded are produced by multinational corporations (MNCs), where Japanese MNCs share a substantial percentage. This means that although Japan as an engine of growth is decreasing, its contribution is not.