Chalongphob Sussangkarn: This paper uses product-level trade data to assess the degree of a country's participation in international machinery production networks in terms of product and destination diversification in the country's machinery parts and components exports, and to document the deepening and widening of production networks in ASEAN. The paper starts by looking at country-level data on machinery shares in manufactured exports and imports, and then moves on to examine ASEAN exports of machinery parts and components by six-digit product/country pairs. Gravity models are estimated to explain the probability of a non-zero six-digit product/country pair in ASEAN's exports of machinery parts and components.
The issue addressed by the paper is very important, particularly for middle-income countries (like my own country, Thailand) that need to deepen their industrial structures and upgrade toward more technologically intensive products as part of the strategy to reach advanced economy status. It is also relevant for...