The Great Supply Chain Shift from China

In a career spanning over 30 years in the UK and Asia, he has held senior roles in international organizations (including the Director of Research at the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo, Chief Programme Officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London and a Visiting Scholar at the IMF in Washington DC), government (including Executive Director of the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry’s think. [...] The shift in industrial production from local and regional supply to global supply took place gradually over the last 100 years and is arguably one of the most revolutionary developments in the history of industrialisation. [...] The switch from inward-oriented to outward-oriented strategies in the 1960s and 1970s galvanised the rapid growth of manufactured exports and created jobs in newly industrializing economies in East Asia like Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. [...] To illustrate this point, Table 4 compares China and South Asian countries on four key aspects of the business environment: (1) wages and labour productivity to indicate labour market conditions, (2) the state of cluster development to represent the quality of suppliers, (3) ports and logistics to represent the connectivity of trade-related infrastructure, and (4) behind-the-border regulations for. [...] First, is the argument in the trade and industrialisation literature in South Asia and the evidence in Table 4 that a conducive business environment matters to participate in supply chains.