Competition among the Manufacturing Exporters of China and ASEAN in the U.S. Market, 1994-2001

This paper aims to compare changes in the competitive position of China and ASEAN-4 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand) as exporters of manufactured goods to the US market between 1994 and 2001. Both static and dynamic shift-share models are employed to the 2-digit ISIC 3 of manufacturing section to investigate the changing patterns of export share that result from the shift effect, consisting industry-mix, export growth and interdependence. Findings from shift-share analysis shows China gained most of the US market share for exporting not only labour-intensive goods but also capital-intensive products at the expense of ASEAN. The static analysis suggests that China and Indonesia had difficulties in their industrial structures whereas Singapore and Malaysia experienced structural advantages. However, the dynamic analysis result shows that in 2001 the difficulties faced by China and Indonesia had disappeared, which indicated such an improvement in export structures had been made while Singapore and Malaysia, on contrary, lost their structural advantages. With respect to competitive effect, both static and dynamic analyses reveal that China’s competitive advantage was extremely strong compared to ASEAN. Indonesia was the best performer amongst ASEAN, mainly corresponding to solid competitive advantage in exporting ISIC 32, which is relatively labour-intensive products to the US market. On the other hand, Singapore recorded the largest loss in the US market share, particularly from 1997 onwards.