Trade Interdependencies in COVID-19-Related Essential Medical Goods: Role of Trade Facilitation and Cooperation for the Asian Economies

Sanchita Basu Das () and Rahul Sen ()
Additional contact information
Sanchita Basu Das: Asian Development Bank, Postal: () is an e conomist at the Economic Research and Regional Cooperation Department, Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Rahul Sen: Auckland University of Technology

No 666, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the state of trade interdependency for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) essential medical goods—vaccines and their value chains, personal protective equipment, and diagnostic test kits—across 29 Asia and the Pacific economies. Expanding on Hayakawa and Imai (2022), the analysis investigates whether trade facilitation, proxied by membership in regional trade agreements (RTAs), can help mitigate any adverse impact on trade in essential medical goods. The results confirm that while trade is critical for Asian economies, its nature differs. Low-income economies are largely dependent on imports, whereas selected middle- and high-income economies are part of two-way trade and engaged in low end of vaccine value chain. We find that onset of the pandemic had hurt exports of these goods. This adverse effect is found to be lowered for economies engaged in RTAs. This emphasizes role of governments in committing to RTAs and implementing trade facilitation measures.

Keywords: COVID-19; vaccine supply chain; essential medical goods; regional trade agreements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F12 F13 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2022-07-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-int and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/trade-interdepend ... ential-medical-goods Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0666

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().