Participations in global value chains and service-link costs in emerging ASEAN economies

This paper aims to examine the participations in global value chains (GVCs) on emerging ASEAN economies by using the UNCTAD-Eora value-added-trade database, and to investigate a major factor that makes the difference in GVCs participations by using the fragmentation model, in particular, with a focus on the factor of service-link costs. The statistical observations demonstrated that the GVCs participations in ASEAN economies has made great progresses during the 1990s along with their per capita GDP growth, and also that there has been a large gap in the degree of GVCs participations between the forerunners and the latecomers in ASEAN economies. The empirical estimation of the fragmentation model could identify the quantitative linkage between GVCs participations and “logistics performances” representing service-link costs in emerging ASEAN economies. Since the logistics performances are one of manageable factors for countries’ strategies, there should still be the policy space for ASEAN latecomers to catch up with the forerunners in GVCs integrations.