Shigeyuki Abe: This paper explores numerically the dependence of ASEAN-5 on their growth engines, i.e., the United States, EU, Japan, China, and India. A structural VAR model is used to find such dependence. The growth multiplier effects results show that the United States is still the largest growth engine, China has overtaken Japan, and India needs more time to be a significant engine. These results agree generally with common sense.
The paper explains nicely the past and current patterns of trade of ASEAN-5 and concurrently remarks that complexity of trade structure in terms of intermediate and final products underestimates the importance of the United States and overestimates that of China at the outset.
If the authors consider such over- and under-estimations are important, it is imperative to divide exports into intermediate products and final goods rather than treating exports as a total and applying the same method to empirically find...