This paper examines the implications of international production fragmentation for analysing global and regional trade patterns, with special emphasis on countries in East Asia. It is found that, while 'fragmentation trade' has generally grown faster than total world manufacturing trade, the degree of dependence of East Asia on this new form of international specialisation is proportionately larger compared to North America and Europe. International production fragmentation has certainly played a pivotal role in continuing dynamism of the East Asian economies and increasing intra-regional economic interdependence. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that this new form of international exchange has contributed to lessoning the regions dependence on the global economy. On the contrary, growth dynamism based on vertical specialisation depends inexorably on extra-regional trade in final good, and this dependence has in fact increased over the years.

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This paper examines Sino-US trade relations, focusing on the ongoing process of global production sharing, involving splitting of the production process into discrete activities that are then allocated across countries, and the resulting trade complementarities between the two countries in world manufacturing trade. The results suggest that the Sino-US trade imbalance is basically a structural phenomenon resulting from the pivotal role played by China as the final assembly centre in East Asia-centered global production networks. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2009 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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This paper examines innovation response of a panel of Japanese firms to the intensified import competition from China for the period 1995-2010. We build a comprehensive firm-level dataset linking innovation activities including patenting and research and development (R&D) merged to cross-industry measures of Chinese import competition. Carefully accounting for a simultaneity bias between innovation and importing and the possible heterogeneous effects across firms, it is found that firms filed for more patens in response to increased import competition from China. However, this effect is only evident for a group of globally engaged firms. At the same time, Chinese import competition has adversely affected the quality of innovation as measured by citations. Overall, firms with a more domestic market focus are the ones who have felt most of the Chinese import competition, which is also reflected in the ir declined R&D efforts.