Many small middle-income countries (SMICs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have experienced a moderation in growth in recent years. Although factor accumulation, most notably capital deepening, was crucial to the success of many SMICs historically, this growth model appears to have run its course....

This paper examines how the Japanese firms’ export decision is affected by the availability of information on export markets, focusing on whether the availability of such information has a different impact on the export decision between large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises...

Korea’s trade with most of its 46 free trade agreement (FTA) partner countries has been expanded continuously. Its FTA utilization ratios were as low as 20% before 2010, and some suspicions regarding the benefits of FTA were raised, despite the government’s active promotion. But Korea...

This Policy Brief is based on the Issues Paper on ASEAN Food Security: Towards a More Comprehensive Framework. The key message is that food security is a priority agenda for the AEC, and the issues to be addressed are: (1) current impediments to agricultural trade and food production; (2)...

As the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are now committed to a deeper integration process towards an ASEAN Commnity beyond 2015, the need for greater and deeper institutionalisation has become more urgent. While ASEAN recognises the need to strengthen its...

This Policy Brief raises some policy issues regarding the capacity of the ASEAN region’s education system in producing knowledge capital as it looks into the opportunities and challenges faced by the sector. This is critical for ASEAN to enable it to attain its quest to be a base for...

Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

This Policy Brief presents an overview of the barriers facing air transport liberalization in ASEAN. It lays out the policies that governments should undertake to overcome these barriers, particularly in light of rapid changes in the aviation industry. It also assesses the incomplete or...

This study has been motivated by the recent shift of energy demand’s gravity to Asia due to decades of robust and stable economic growth in the region. Said economic growth has correspondingly led to increases in per capita income in emerging economies in ASEAN and East Asia. Past empirical...

The Policy Brief suggests initiatives that poorer ASEAN member governments should take to stimulate technological upgrading of firms at the bottom with a focus on innovation, and discusses the governance framework of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in ASEAN. With an emphasis on technology as...