Politics, Institutions, and Innovation in East Asia: National Performance in the Global Auto Industry.

This paper explores the reasons for divergent national achievements in automotive industrialization by six East Asian countries: South Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite common ambitions to develop local automotive production within the global automotive value chain, these countries have varied in areas such as the shift from assembly to the local manufacture of OEM parts and components; the shift from OEM to ODM or OBM; and the degree to which these shifts involve indigenous firms and workers. Our approach builds on but goes beyond comparative institutional frameworks such as new institutional economics and ?varieties of capitalism.? First, we aim to integrate domestic comparative institutional analysis with work on global industries by exploring the ways in which the global automotive value chain itself influences national institutions and their political bases. Second, we draw an explicit distinction among development tasks that allows us to assess the kinds of institutional and political capacities required for different kinds of automotive performance. We are especially interested in local innovation-related areas such as technical training and standards development. Such challenges pose different kinds of difficulties than does, say, tariff liberalization. Finally, we assess national cases that do not exhibit the kinds of complementary institutional "packages" emphasized by the varieties of capitalism approach. Like most developing countries, our cases tend to be more hybrid arrangements in which non-market institutions in one area, say finance, coexist with market or arms-length arrangements in others, such as wages and skills. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]