Research Activities
Research Projects 2026
Can Asian industrialization be sustained with global production fragmentation, mobile capital and footloose workers?
Outline
Cross-border dispersion of tasks within production processes (“global production fragmentation”) is a key feature of recent globalization. Fragmentation creates opportunities for countries to specialize in specific slices of a production process within the global manufacturing value chain (GMVC). However, whether such specialization provides late-industrializing countries with a viable pathway to sustained industrial transformation remains unproven. While they have proven adept at attracting foreign capital (FDI) for low-value-added manufacturing, their success rate with investments in skill-intensive and technology-intensive activities is very uneven. Other recent changes, especially the increasing international mobility of labor with strong positive selection on skills, pose additional challenges and complications for latecomers as their more-skilled workers increasingly consider earnings in more advanced countries as their ‘reference wages’ in employment decisions. We propose a model and two country case studies to understand better how middle-income economies can sustain industrial development in a world of fragmented production and internationally mobile labor. Our work has the explicit goal of informing development policy.
Period
April 2026 - March 2028
Members
| Role | Member |
|---|---|
| [ Organizer ] | Coxhead, Ian |
| [ Co-researcher ] | Athukorala(Australian National University Professor emeritus) |
*Affiliations are as of April 2026.
Expected Outcome
- Peer-Reviewed Journal