This book answers the recently topical questions of how China’s processed trade affects the trade of Southeast Asia. What is Southeast Asia’s role in Factory Asia, the region’s complex of cross-border supply chains? What is Southeast Asia’s involvement in building or joining production networks in the region? And, most important, how can Southeast Asia increase the value added of its products and improve its competitiveness? This book provides rigorous analysis of how trade policy affects value added, highly disaggregated at the firm and product level, of the six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Viet Nam – and combines this with thorough examinations of their trade, industrial and labour policies.

Bill Pritchard provides an important update on how current trade methodologies are implemented as China becomes one of the world’s largest fresh fruit importers from countries such as Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.

Explains how production networks and industrial clusters have played crucial roles in the industrial development of Indonesia and Malaysia (electronics industry), Singapore (biomedical science industry), and Thailand (automotive industry).

This book examines the challenges that ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members need to overcome in order to sustain and intensify economic growth. The ASEAN market is widely regarded as a new hub of growth, not least in light of increasing protectionism and declining economic growth of the three largest countries in Northeast Asia (China, Japan, and South Korea). Contributors address a range of issues with a concentrated focus on evidence from Indonesia, including globalisation, increasing populism, trade, FDI, the benefits of the production network, and related issues such as spill-over, crises, innovation and technology, and selected sectoral commodity and policy analysis of Indonesia. This book analyses and explains the relationship between trade and foreign direct investment, and technical changes, with regard to improving ‘productivity’ in the supply-side economic growth model using, in particular, Indonesia as the de facto leader of ASEAN. This book will be of interest to academics and students specialising in international economics and international development.

This collection of twenty essays provides an unprecedented overview of Chinese trade through the centuries, highlighting its scope, diversity, complexity, and the commodities that have linked it with Southeast Asia.

This book answers the recently topical questions of how China’s processed trade affects the trade of Southeast Asia. What is Southeast Asia’s role in Factory Asia, the region’s complex of cross-border supply chains? What is Southeast Asia’s involvement in building or joining production networks in the region? And, most important, how can Southeast Asia increase the value added of its products and improve its competitiveness? This book provides rigorous analysis of how trade policy affects value added, highly disaggregated at the firm and product level, of the six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Viet Nam – and combines this with thorough examinations of their trade, industrial and labour policies.

The launch of the ASEAN Economic Community raises key issues: the deepening of regional trade and the associated problem of exchange rate management. This volume questions the capacity of a shallow institution to deal with complex impacts on employment and inequality. Contributors analyze ASEAN's potential and weakness in readable terms.

Recent changes in the global economy and in Southeast Asian national political economies have led to new forms of commodity production and new commodities. Using insights from political economy and commodity studies, the essays in Taking Southeast Asia to Market trace the myriad ways recent alignments among producers, distributors, and consumers are affecting people and nature throughout the region. In case studies ranging from coffee and hardwood products to mushroom pickers and Vietnamese factory workers, the authors detail the Southeast Asian articulations of these processes while also discussing the broader implications of these shifts. Taken together, the cases show how commodities illuminate the convergence of changing social forces in Southeast Asia today, as they transform the terms, practices, and experiences of everyday life and politics in the global economy.

This timely book deploys new tools and measures to understand how global production networks change the nature of global economic interdependence, and how that in turn changes our understanding of which policies are appropriate in this new environment.

Laos, Paul T. Cohen.