Regional integration and industrial growth among developing countries - the case of three ASEAN members

Has the revival of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the early 1990s affected the industrial growth of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines? The author uses two mechanisms to capture this potential impact: scale effects, and intermediate imports variety. She performs the analysis on twenty two industries (at the three-digit level of the International Standard Industrial Classification) over the period 1971-95. The results show significant heterogeneity in industry-level returns to scale. Moreover, the three ASEAN members have very small, mostly negative cross-industry scale effects. As a result, they may not achieve large, or across-the-board gains from their regional arrangement through scale effects. The author finds unexpected results with respect to the role of intermediate imports variety in industrial growth. She finds no support for the hypothesis that non-regional (rest of the world) suppliers, and goods variety have a positive effect on ASEAN industries through the channel of imported intermediate inputs. The regional variety measure, however, seems to have a positive effect on the output growth of a handful of industries. This result seems due to the fact that these countries have long had a strong intra-regional, and intra-industry trade, whose history predates, and outweighs the ASEAN revival.