In the last decades, the East Asian region has experienced important economic transformations that have led to important growth and economic development. A crucial part of this growth has been due to the contribution of the foreign sector, and more specifically the trade in manufactures, establishing a model of economic growth based largely on exports of this type of goods.
The Spanish foreign sector has also undergone important changes in recent decades, although the need to expand foreign markets and the improvement of the technological intensity of manufactured exports are two pending tasks to be able to compete more efficiently in the international markets. The Spanish authorities have emphasised these needs and have been defined as objectives to be achieved in the different internationalisation strategies for the Spanish economy designed in recent years, and although improvements have been made, there is still ample scope to deepen the reforms needed to achieve a more efficient pattern of manufacturing specialisation. In most cases, the analysis of these deficiencies has been confined to the country, without paying special attention to the study of the regional aspect, and to the high regional geographic concentration in the Spanish production of manufactures with a higher technological content, highlighting the unavoidable need to implement economic policy tools to improve the supply of new products with high technological content.
This article analyses the technological intensity of manufactures exported by the Spanish autonomous communities to the world and the main territories of East Asia: China, Japan, Korea, ASEAN, Hong Kong and Taiwan, for the period 2000 to 2016. As we mentioned before, this choice is based on the importance that these territories have achieved in the international markets of manufactures in general, and of manufactures with high technological intensity in particular, and also based on the low presence in the economic literature in Spain.
This analysis fills a crucial gap in the economic literature regarding the technological intensity of manufactures exported by Spanish regions, and it is for this reason that our study aims to provide scientific evidence for the case of the technological intensity of manufactures exported by Spanish autonomous communities to the world and to the East Asian region. Therefore, it could serve as an important tool on the assessment of economic policy measures implemented to increase regional exports of manufactures with a higher technological content. This work can also be a good tool for Spanish companies that wish to internationalise their processes in the countries of the study, identifying market niches and difficulties in internationalising their processes in East Asian countries. Likewise, it can serve the Spanish authorities at national and regional level in charge of designing policies aimed at favouring these processes of business internationalisation, identifying comparative advantages, and reinforcing economic policy tools aimed at improving the financing, training and qualification of companies exporting manufactures with a high technological content. Thus, this article has a significant relevance due to the need to improve the regional export propensity of manufactures with a higher technological content, since achieving these objectives could help to attain greater economic growth, showing that product specialisation from the point of view of technological intensity is not neutral on potential of wealth creation.
One of the aims of this paper is to determine the weight of the foreign manufacturing sector in the Spanish regional economies, since the measures and the scope of the economic policies to be implemented to improve the technological intensity of manufacturing will depend to a certain degree on the importance of this sector in each of the autonomous communities, and for this it will be essential to determine the technological breakdown of manufactures exported by the Spanish regions to the world and to the countries of East Asia, as well as to analyse the evolution of their technological pattern during the study period. This article also aims to determine the main manufactures with high technological intensity exported by the Spanish regions to the countries of East Asia, to analyse their level of concentration, and the degree of similarity of the distributions of exports of manufactures with high technological intensity among each of the Spanish autonomous communities, and that of Spain as a whole.The database used in this study is Datacomex of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism of Spain, which collects data on declared trade provided by the Department of Customs and Special Taxes of the State Agency of the Tax Administration.
In the regional study of manufactures exported according to their technological content by Spain and by the Spanish regions to the world and the countries of East Asia, a statistical analysis is carried out using the technological classification established by the OECD, where manufactures are broken down into four groups: high technology manufactures, medium-high technology, medium-low technology, and low technology. The disaggregation of manufactures used in this article is at five-digit level, which provides a high level of disaggregation, avoiding the likely drawbacks derived from a high level of aggregation.
In the analysis of the concentration of exported manufactures, we used the Theil concentration index, while in the study of the similarity between the distributions of exports to the world and to the East Asian countries regarding manufactures with high technological intensity, between the Spainsh regions and Spain as whole, we use the Finger-Kreinin index.
From the analysis of the manufactures exports, it is observed that there is no clear relationship between the weight of the manufacturing sector in the regional economies and the volume of exports with high technological intensity. Although it is difficult to establish a pattern regarding the evolution of manufactures with high intensity exported by the Spanish regions, some autonomous communities, such as the Community of Madrid, have significantly increased the proportion of manufactures exported with high technological intensity as they increased their sales abroad in absolute terms, establishing a pattern of industrialisation focused on those manufactures with a higher added value. Moreover, from the analysis of manufactures exports to the countries of East Asia, we can conclude that exports values can be improved both in quantitative and qualitative terms, and that there is a significant concentration of manufactures exports in a few regions. Madrid, followed by Castilla-León and Andalucía are among the Spanish regions that showed a good performance during the study period, and among those that better adapted to the pattern of specialisation of Asian imports, on the other hand are regions such as Galicia, Cantabria, Extremadura or Murcia. Likewise, the evolution of the value of exports of manufactures with high technological intensity is very heterogeneous, and there is no a defined pattern. From the analysis of the concentration index, it is observed that a high concentration is associated with a low level of value exports, that is why as value of exports increases, there is a greater product diversification. Moreover, there is a greater concentration in manufactures exported to the East Asian countries than those exported to the rest of the world. Overall, from the results obtained by the Finger-Kreinin index, we can conclude that the Spanish regions have a distribution of exports of manufactures with a high technological intensity quite similar to that of the nation as a whole, that these distributions have been homogenised with that of the country as a whole over time, with a greater homogeneity in the case of those regions with high propensity to exports manufactures of high technological content. Classification-JEL: R1 Keywords: Exportaciones de Manufacturas Regionales, Intensidad Tecnológica, diversificación de la actividad económica, Especialización, Competitividad, Regional Manufacturing Exports, Technological Intensity, Sophistication, Diversification, Competitiveness Pages: 103-135 Volume: 2 Year: 2021 File-URL: http://www.revistaestudiosregionales.com/documentos/articulos/pdf-articulo-2614.pdf File-Format: Application/pdf Handle: RePEc:rer:articu:v:2:y:2021:p:103-135