This study explains the various influences of the Japanese automobile industry on industrial development in both Southeast Asia and Europe.

This book addresses the changing nature of high-tech industries in Asia, particularly in the electronics sector. Its up-to-date findings will be invaluable to those involved in management, production networks and corporate strategy.

The book provides a comprehensive examination of patterns and determinants of production networks in East Asia, a key driver in the region’s global success. It provides the reader with an accessible understanding of the theoretical literature on production networks and recent developments in empirical analysis at the industry and firm-levels. The topics covered in the book include: gross trade in parts and components and gravity models, trade in value added, industry case studies, and micro data econometric studies of firm heterogeneity in production networks. The micro data econometric studies explore key aspects of the heterogeneity of firms in East Asian production networks such as technological capability, the entry of small and medium enterprises into production networks, business use of free trade agreements, and access to credit. Blending new sources of data, empirical tools and econometric methods this book is highly recommended for readers who seek to understand the workings of the complex web of production networks in East Asia.

Much more than a simple examination of EU-Asia relations, this book examines the idea that the EU may constitute a 'model' for East Asian regionalism. It challenges specialists on the EU to understand the EU's impact on Asia and Asia's impact on the EU whilst illustrating that there is a commonality of interests in both Europe and Asia.

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).

News headlines warn of rivalries and competing nations across Asia and the Pacific, even as powerful new cross-border relations form as never before. This book looks behind the Asia-Pacific curtain: at the new forms of social, economic, and political integration taking place through a global capitalism that is rife with contradictions, inequality, and crisis. We are moved beyond traditional conceptualizations of the inter-state system with its nation-state competition as the core organizing principle of world capitalism and the principal institutional framework that shapes the makeup of global social forces. These important studies examine and debate over how there is a growing transnationality of material (economic) relations in the global era, as well as an emerging transnationality of many social and class relations. How does transnational capitalist class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization in Asia and Oceania? How have states and institutions become entwined with such processes? This book provides insight into a field of dynamic change.

This book investigates the reasons why regionalism in East Asia has been much weaker than in Western Europe and North America. It focuses particularly on economic factors, examining the regional and global linkages of production networks. Through a focused exploration of regional and global production networks, it argues that East Asia was not as regionally concentrated as was Western Europe or North America, lacking a regionally oriented productional basis to support the institutional arrangement of East Asia as a stand-alone economic community. Moreover, the regional production networks of each national economy in the region are influenced by a different set of value-added components from different global and regional origins. This divergence in their positions accounts for the mushrooming of divergent initiatives and projects for regional institutional arrangement. Finally, the institutional choices of the states to join Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CP/TPP) and/or Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are found to be strongly influenced by the sectoral focuses and priorities of their economies. Demonstrating how the unique economic factors of each nation override other considerations for greater regional integration, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of international trade, Asian politics and economics.

Accelerating processes of economic globalization have fundamentally reshaped the organization of the global economy towards much greater integration and functional interdependence through cross-border economic activity. In this interconnected world system, a new form of economic organization has emerged: Global Production Networks (GPNs). This brings together a wide array of economic actors, most notably capitalist firms, state institutions, labour unions, consumers and non-government organizations, in the transnational production of economic value. National and sub-national economic development in this highly interdependent global economy can no longer be conceived of, and understood within, the distinct territorial boundaries of individual countries and regions. Instead, global production networks are organizational platforms through which actors in these different national or regional economies compete and cooperate for a larger share of the creation, transformation, and capture of value through transnational economic activity. They are also vehicles for transferring the value captured between different places. This book ultimately aims to develop a theory of global production networks that explains economic development in the interconnected global economy. While primarily theoretical in nature, it is well grounded in cutting-edge empirical work in the parallel and highly impactful strands of social science literature on the changing organization of the global economy relating to global commodity chains (GCC), global value chains (GVC), and global production networks (GPN).

This comprehensive Handbook provides an in-depth analysis of the nature of East Asian economic integration alongside thoughtful insights into contemporary issues, such as agricultural development, structural transformation and East Asian trade, alongside skills and human capital development policies of ASEAN. Contributors also provide detailed explanations on trade, poverty and Aid for Trade, institutional reforms, regulatory reform and measuring integration.