From a Spoke to a Hub: The Case of South Korea

Abstract

A few East Asian newly industrialized countries that used to belong to the Global South not only have joined the Global North but also have organized their own production chains in specific industries. Given the imperialist and exploitative nature of global production chains established by the Global North, it should be questioned whether the production chains organized by the East Asian newly industrialized countries are free from the innate nature of production chains. This article adopts a multiregional input-output analysis to examine the bilateral trade relationship between Korea and Vietnam. It finds that the Korean economy has unequally captured the benefits from the bilateral trade with Vietnam in terms of the domestic value-added share and the spillover effect derived from the final demand for Vietnamese products in the textile and electronics industries.

JEL Classification: F62, F63

Keywords

regional production chains Korea-Vietnam bilateral trade value added in trade structural decomposition analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Amsden

Alice

. 1989. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bair

Jennifer

. 2005. Global capitalism and commodity chains: Looking back, going forward. Competition & Change 9 (2): 153–80.

Balassa

Bela

. 1986. Intra-industry specialization: A cross-country analysis. European Economic Review 30 (1): 27–42.

Chang

Ha-Joon

. 1994. The Political Economy of Industrial Policy. New York: St. Martin’s.

Evans

Peter B.

1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gereffi

Gary

. 1999. International trade and industrial upgrading in the apparel commodity chain. Journal of International Economics 48 (1): 37–70.

Glawe

Linda

Wagner

Helmut

. 2022. The Economic Rise of East Asia: Development Paths of Japan, South Korea, and China. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

Kordalska

Aleksandra

Olczyk

Magdalena

. 2023. Upgrading low value-added activities in global value chains: A functional specialization approach. Economic Systems Research 35 (2): 265–91.

Lin

Justin

Chang

Ha-Joon

. 2009. Should industrial policy in developing countries conform to comparative advantage or defy it? A debate between Justin Lin and Ha-Joon Chang. Development Policy Review 27 (5): 483–502.

10.

Meng

Chao

. 2007. Application of the Input-Output Decomposition Technique to China’s Regional Economies. JETRO Discussion Paper no. 102. Chiba, Japan: Institute of Developing Economies. Accessed at: https://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Reports/Dp/102.html.

11.

Miller

Ronald E.

Blair

Peter D.

2022. Input-Output Analysis: Foundations and Extensions. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12.

Poulantzas

Nicos

. 1975. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: New Left Books.

13.

Smith

John

. 2016. Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century: Globalization, Super-exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press.

14.

Sturgeon

Timothy J.

Kawakami

Momoko

. 2011. Global value chains in the electronics industry: Characteristics, crisis, and upgrading opportunities for firms from developing countries. International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development 4 (1–3): 120–47.

15.

Suwandi

Intan

. 2019. Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

16.

Wade

Robert

. 1990. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

17.

Westphal

Larry E.

1990. Industrial policy in an export-propelled economy: Lessons from South Korea’s experience. Journal of Economic Perspectives 4 (3): 41–59.

18.

Woo-Cumings

Meredith

, ed. 1999. The Developmental State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

19.

World Bank. 1993. The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. A World Bank Policy Research Report. New York: Oxford University Press.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.02 MB