Will Southeast Asia be the next global manufacturing hub? A multiway cointegration, causality, and dynamic connectedness analyses on factors influencing offshore decisions

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled multinational corporations to diversify their global supply chain risk and to relocate their factories to Southeast Asian countries beyond China. Such recent phenomena provide a good opportunity to understand the factors that influenced offshore decisions in the last two decades. We propose a new conceptual framework based on econometric approaches to examine the relationships between these factors. Firstly, the Vector Auto Regression (VAR) for multi-way cointegration analysis by a Johansen test as well as the embedding Granger causality analysis to examine offshore decisions--innovation, technology readiness, infrastructure, foreign direct investment (FDI), and intermediate imports. Secondly, a Quantile Vector Autoregressive (QVAR) model is used to assess the dynamic connectedness among Southeast Asian countries based on the offshore factors. This study explores a system-wide experiment to evaluate the spillover effects of offshore decisions. It reports a comprehensive analysis using time-series data collected from the World Bank. The results of the cointegration, causality, and dynamic connectedness analyses show that a subset of Southeast Asian countries have spillover effects on each other. These countries present a multi-way cointegration and dynamic connectedness relationship. The study contributes to policymaking by providing a data-driven innovative approach through a new conceptual framework.