Asian-Pacific Economic Literature最新文献

Modern entrepreneurship is vital to economic sustainability in conceptualising, modelling, mapping, and framing the new concept of socially and environmentally sustainable businesses. This paper explores how modern entrepreneurship can be used to identify and address productive, unproductive, and destructive social and environmental practices. By examining the relationship between modern entrepreneurship, socio-economic constraints, and environmental boundaries, this paper evaluates the importance of modern entrepreneurship on both social-economic and environmental performance. The findings suggest that significant institutional transformation is necessary to improve socio-economic performance, and a well-crafted regulatory framework is critical to achieving positive environmental outcomes. Overall, this research highlights the importance of considering both social-economic and environmental factors when evaluating the impact of modern entrepreneurship.

This paper examines causes behind recent changes in income inequality in China, especially its moderation since 2008, using household survey data and decomposition analyses. It is found that, by income sources, contributors to the moderation in inequality were wage income, pension, and other transfers, offset somewhat by the inequality-increasing effect of changes in net farm and nonfarm business incomes, net asset income, imputed rent, and personal income tax and social security contribution. By household characteristics, contributors to inequality moderation were a narrowing in the urban–rural income gap, rural–urban migration, and a decline in regional income disparity, offset by widening inter-industry earning differentials, a rise in the education premium, and changes in some unknown factors. These results are likely an outcome of some fundamental drivers working together, including processes of catch-up growth and structural transformation, market-driven forces including technological progress and globalisation, government policy actions, and remaining market distortions.

This study contributes to understanding the supply mechanism of household loan portfolios in Korea, where the ratio of household debt to GDP is high. This study conducted an empirical analysis of how banks' financial characteristics including capital adequacy, financial soundness, and profitability affect banks' supply of variable-rate household loans that are sensitive to increases in the central bank's base interest rate and have higher possibility of loan default, considering time lag in terms of banks' risk-taking behaviour. The main results suggest that the proportion and change of variable-rate loans are significantly affected by the level and change of financial characteristics. In particular, a high level of capital adequacy enabled banks to supply risky loans by increasing their risk tolerance.

This paper analyzes the effects of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs) on exports while considering the degree of participation in the global value chains (GVCs). Standard-like non-tariff measures, such as Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), have influenced trade by increasing trade costs or improving consumers' awareness. Theoretically, NTMs can have either positive or negative effects on trade flows. In this study the characteristics of the production process are considered in order to disentangle the arguments of ‘standards as barriers’ and ‘standards as catalyst’. Due to the expansion of GVCs, NTMs have accumulated along production processes. Cumulative NTMs along the GVCs affect not only the direct trade sector and its partners, but also other relevant sectors and countries indirectly through the production chains. We use panel data on product-level ASEAN exports for 2007–2019 to estimate the effects of NTMs depending on GVC participation. The estimated results show that the impact of SPS and TBT is heterogeneous according to the degree of GVC participation. While SPS and TBT regulations have been found to promote trade, their positive effects are less significant for industries involved in forward and upstream GVC participation. This reflects the characteristics of these sectors, which require higher levels of technology and skilled labour compared to backward GVC participation and downstream sectors. As a result, ASEAN exporters heavily involved in forward and upstream GVCs face increased production costs to comply with the requirements of the standard-like NTMs. The increased production costs limit the trade-promoting effects of the standard-like NTMs.

This study investigates the effect of agricultural trade openness on fruit prices in South Korea considering the quality improvement originating from agricultural trade policies by examining the U-shaped relationship between agricultural openness and fruit prices. Utilising the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and annual data from the period 1988–2019, we find that while an increase of agricultural openness leads to a reduction in fruit prices, an increase of square of agricultural openness leads to a rise of fruit prices in the long-run. In other words, our hypothesis of a U-shaped relationship between agricultural openness and fruit prices is satisfied. This finding implies that determining the optimal amount of high-quality fruit is important for fruit farmers' income. Additionally, Korea should divide the fruit consumer price index (CPI) into high-quality and traditional fruit to solve the problem of an increase in fruit CPI without an actual increase in the price of traditional fruit.

This paper investigates the connectedness between China's economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and the geopolitical risk (GPR) of the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) using quantile time-varying parameter vector autoregression. The empirical results indicate that China's EPU becomes a net risk transmitter at the median quantile, demonstrating that ASEAN countries' GPR is vulnerable to China's economic shocks. Furthermore, extreme events such as COVID-19 amplify the connection between EPU and GPR, leading to a higher total connectedness index value. Moreover, the pairwise spillover effect analysis reflects that the risk launcher effect of China's EPU is longer and more prominent for Thailand and the Philippines than for Malaysia and Indonesia, which enriches the hypothesis. The contributions are as follows. This paper selects emerging China as the research object and first discusses its economic influence on neighbouring countries. In addition, fully analysing the heterogeneous spillover effects of EPU on the GPR of different countries makes our suggestions diversified and practical. Therefore, improving recognisable ability and institutional quality will promote ASEAN countries to mitigate their vulnerability to China's EPU shocks. Meanwhile, China's government should quickly respond to external uncertainties, prudently adjust economic policies, and avoid large swings of EPU volatility.