Catching-Up Industrial Development of East Asian Economies and Its Application to Vietnam

This paper examines the catching-up process in industrial development in East Asia. For this purpose, RCA curve will be used to depict this process and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient will be employed as a supporting evidence for the catching-up. Evolving specialization patterns of East Asian economies are consistent with the prediction of the Catching-up Product Cycle model. Japan has the most advanced industrial structure, followed by NIEs, and ASEAN. Their specialization patterns evolved from a late-industrializing pattern to an intermediate, and finally to an advanced pattern. The late-industrializing economies followed in the footsteps of early industrializing ones creating a regional interdependence linkage. The paper suggests that the late industrializing economies could accelerate industrialization by following in the footsteps of the early industrializing economies. The paper further finds that Vietnam joined the regional network. However, its trade policy has been impeding industrial development so that labor-intensive production has been untapped, on one hand, and Vietnam selected the 'wrong' industries to target on the other hand.