Asian Economic Journal最新文献

This study examines the short-term impact of the compulsory primary education law (CPEL) on the educational attainment of children in Vietnam. This study uses the 1999 Vietnam Population and Housing Census and survival analysis to account for the right-censoring problem in the educational outcomes of children. The study found that CPEL reduces the dropout rate of children by 12%. However, the effect is minor, especially when compared with the impact of family income and parents' education. This finding is similar to those of other studies, suggesting that in addition to CPEL, other family income support and parent-oriented policies are crucial to improving children's educational attainment.

This study treats the introduction of smartphones and access to the Korean gasoline market as a natural experiment, investigating how they affect consumer search costs. We estimate consumer search costs in different regional districts in Seoul and examine how smartphone proliferation affects search costs. Our findings indicate that the widespread use of smartphones reduced consumer search costs, and this reduction was more significant in districts with higher competition across firms. We can also infer that reduced search costs narrowed the market's dispersion of prices and markups.

This study takes China's one-child policy (OCP)—a widely known policy intervention for family planning—as an example to illustrate that an income-based penalty scheme for above-quota births may cause fertility inequality. A couple can legally have only one child under the OCP, and those who exceed the quota are subject to fines. To ensure that this penalty scheme does not biasedly affect only low-income people who are relatively more sensitive to fines of a certain amount, it was designed to be income-based, which makes the perceived cost of the rich equal to that of the poor. However, we find that due to the limited liability nature of the financial penalty, it unintentionally created fertility inequality that favors the poor. Relying on city-year-level panel data, we find that this mechanism partly explains the lower birth rates in rich cities in the OCP era; the gap narrowed rapidly after the OCP abolition.

Our paper empirically investigates the role of economic cooperation involving trade in coronavirus disease (COVID-19)-related essential medical goods—vaccines and their value chains, personal protective equipment, and diagnostic test kits—across 29 Asia and the Pacific economies. The paper incorporates vaccines and their global value chain products trade for the first time in the empirical literature. We further investigate whether trade facilitation, proxied by membership in regional trade agreements (RTAs), can help mitigate any adverse impact on trade in essential medical goods, applying a structural gravity framework. The results confirm that while trade is critical for Asian economies, its nature differs. Low-income economies are largely dependent on imports, whereas selected middle- and high-income economies are part of two-way trade and engaged in the low end of the vaccine value chain. We find that the onset of the pandemic has hurt exports of these goods. This adverse effect is found to be lowered for economies engaged in RTAs. This emphasizes the role of governments in committing to RTAs and implementing trade facilitation measures.

We examine two economic self-interest hypotheses regarding the determinants of public attitudes toward immigrants: (1) the labor market hypothesis, which states that the employment and wage impacts of immigration determine the public attitudes, and (2) the welfare state hypothesis, which states that natives hold negative perceptions of immigrants due to concerns that they may strain the country's welfare budget. The first hypothesis predicts that natives' education will affect pro-immigrant attitudes more positively when immigrants come from lower income countries. The second hypothesis predicts that natives' income affects the pro-immigrant attitudes more negatively when immigrants come from lower income countries. We use the Japanese General Social Survey, which asks respondents' tolerance toward immigrants from different countries, allowing us to control for unobserved individual characteristics through a method akin to the fixed effect estimation. Our results indicate no difference in the effects of education and income on pro-immigrant attitudes regardless of whether immigrants come from high- or low-income countries. We conclude that economic self-interest does not explain Japanese public attitudes toward immigrants. We discuss the policy implications about how to improve public attitudes toward immigrants.