The Singapore Economic Review

Globalization has its detractors as well as supporters. Concerns have been expressed about the greater ease of fragmenting the production process so that more parts can be outsourced to a variety of countries. Highly developed regions worry about the possibility of greater unemployment or lower unskilled wage rates. Less developed regions are concerned that they may not possess a comparative advantage in the service link activities that promote fragmentation. The paper discusses these issues, with special emphasis on India and China.

This paper is a non-technical survey of the literature on offshoring and outsourcing, with special focus on the relevance of this literature for Asia. We first see how and to what extent this new literature helps us understand firms' tradeoffs between outsourcing and integration, the variation in the mixes of organizational forms and the location of outsourced activities. We also explore what plausibly triggers offshoring and thereafter what determines its dynamics. Finally, we draw inferences from the existing theory and empirical work about the developmental impact of offshoring on Asia, with special attention to issues related to inequality and poverty.

This paper evaluates data validity of available empirical sources and the extent of services sector labor market impact of offshoring in the US, EU-15 and Japan. A three-tier data validity hierarchy is identified, while the employment impact of offshoring in the three regions is found to be limited. Correspondingly, developing Asia is unlikely to experience large-scale employment gains as a destination region. Instead, the crucial role of domestic entrepreneurs in the growth of the Indian IT-related services industry is highlighted, as are the twin educational challenges facing developing Asia: the need to improve both primary and higher education simultaneously.

This paper examines India's role in services outsourcing within Asia. It provides a brief overview of the global as well as Indian services outsourcing industry. The core section examines India's relationship with other Asian countries such as China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia in service outsourcing. It examines the extent to which these countries pose a competitive challenge to India and concludes that at this time, India is far ahead although it is likely to face growing competition as its costs rise. The paper highlights the need to move beyond this comparative paradigm and to examine the complementary and collaborative opportunities that exist between India and other Asian countries in services outsourcing. It concludes that there is considerable scope for such synergies and that India and other Asian countries can form different parts of a larger regional or global delivery model. Regional and bilateral agreements within Asia can also facilitate this process.

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile, since (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of "Factory Asia" — in particular, on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created "Factory Asia" is not subject to WTO discipline (bindings); (iii) there is no "top-level management" to substitute for WTO discipline, i.e., to ensure that bilateral trade tensions — tensions that are inevitable in East Asia — do not spillover into region-wide problems due to lack of cooperation and communication. This paper argues that the window of opportunity for East Asian "vision" was missed; what East Asia needs now is "management", not vision. East Asia should launch a "New East Asian Regional Management Effort", with a reinforced ASEAN + 3 being the most likely candidate for the job. The first priority should be to bind the region's unilateral tariff cuts in the WTO.

This paper examines the implications of international fragmentation of production for trade patterns of Singapore and the other ASEAN economies, with emphasis on their regional and global economic integration. The analysis reveals that the degree of dependence of these countries on this new global division of labor is much larger compared to the other countries of East Asia, Europe and North America. China has emerged as an important trading partner for ASEAN within regional production networks. Network-related trade in parts and components has certainly strengthened economic interdependence among ASEAN countries and between ASEAN, China and the other major economies in East Asia, but this has not lessened the dependence of growth dynamism of these countries on the global economy. The operation of the regional cross-border production networks depends inexorably on trade in final goods with North America and the European Union.

A key feature of globalization in the current era has been the rapid spread of cross-border production sharing in many regions of the world, including Europe, North America and Asia. The effects of these developments in the context of regional trade integration have been examined in the recent literature. This paper looks at their implications for regional monetary integration and exchange-rate policies. Cross-border production networks and the intra-industry trade associated with them affect exchange-rate behavior, balance of payments adjustment, and the transmission of shocks and disturbances. This paper examines the policy implications of regional production networks that (i) are confined to the countries of a given region, and (ii) involve a dominant extra-regional economy.

This paper empirically examines the impacts of exchange rate volatility on the location choice by Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) and their intra-firm trade. We use affiliate-level data for Japanese MNCs for 1995, 1998 and 2001. We found that high exchange rate volatility discourages the establishment of an affiliate by MNCs. Moreover, the high exchange rate volatility causes the shift from inter-firm to intra-firm transactions. These findings imply the importance of maintaining a stable exchange rate environment in order for MNCs to expand their production and distribution networks.

This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on productive performance of manufacturing industries in Singapore. The paper develops an outsourcing measure based on the narrow definition of intermediate imports given by Feenstra and Hanson (1996, 1999). Based on the input-output tables, the study uses 5-digit industrial-level classifications to measure the impact of outsourcing on productivity of the manufacturing industries in Singapore from 1995–2004. The outsourcing measure is further decomposed by import of services, import of IT services and import of business services. This decomposition allows us to study the impact of outsourcing of services in addition to the cross-border fragmentation of products and components. The results suggest strong positive impact of cross-border sourcing on the productivity of the manufacturing sector. The decomposition of outsourcing measure indicates that the manufacturing industries are more involved in cross-border sourcing of services, particularly in business services.