Survey on electrical and electronic products

Abstract

It gives me particular pleasure to participate in this seminar and to congratulate the Institute of East Asian Studies for organizing it. I plan to do my research on "Export Competition between Thailand/Malaysia and China in the U.S. Market: A Survey on Electrical and Electronic Products". So, first of all, I would like to introduce my project briefly. The past two decades have seen substantial changing patterns of export share and export merchandise among Thailand, Malaysia and China as exporters of primary commodities, labour-intensive goods as well as technology or capital-intensive manufactures to their common U.S. import market. With their intention to upgrade their industrial structure and to promote high-tech industry, especially in computer and telecommunication technologies, electrical and electronic products account for a growing and huge proportion of their exports. So, there exists much export competition in this regard and this project intends to address whether the ASEAN-2 countries and China are trade competitors and the extent of export competition in the U.S. market for electrical and electronic products, in order to further tap the potential of economic complementarily with each other and to promote mutual understanding and continuously search for new fields and ways for co-operation, which will have direct impacts on China-ASEAN relationship as a whole in the future. Also, this project will analyses how important relative changes in real exchange rate, cost and technological level are in influencing export competitiveness of Thailand/Malaysia and China in the U.S. market for the above products. Furthermore, this project will seek to find some possible approaches to attaining a propitious outcome of the competition, and ways to ameliorate adverse effects of the rivalry. The period chosen for study is from 1980 to 1999. Four phases are distinguished: The first half of the 1980s; The second half of the 1980s; The years before the financial crisis (1991-96); and The years during the financial crisis (1997-99). The research project will study the following related issues: To identify a shifting pattern of comparative advantage of the ASEAN-2 in the U.S. market with special reference to China during the above four periods in the above mentioned products, employing a revealed comparative measure; To find out how competitive the ASEAN-2 and China were in increasing their exports to the U.S. market, using shift-share model; To evaluate how relative changes in real exchange rate', product composition, industrial structure and growth rates affect export competitiveness; To analyses the competitive advantage of each in labour cost and technological level, using Porter's theory of competitive advantage.