Iikka Korhonen: This paper assesses the dependence of GDP growth in ASEAN-5 countries on the largest economies of the world—namely, the EU, the United States, China, and Japan. The authors find that the United States is still the most important single growth driver for all ASEAN-5 countries, although China's importance has clearly increased since the 1980s. Also, the EU is more important as a growth driver than Japan, despite Japan's geographical proximity to the region. It should be noted that all ASEAN-5 countries are not identical in terms of their growth engines, and, for example, China is more important for Singapore than it is for other ASEAN countries.
The econometric methodology utilized in the study was previously used by Abeysinghe and Forbes (2005). The structural VAR linking together various countries via a trade (share) matrix is an appropriate method to assess various countries’ influence on others’ economic growth....