ALSA 2025 meeting

In the 1930s, Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu coined the term “flying geese” to describe Asia’s dynamic patterns of industrial development. In this model, once a lead economy upgrades into higher-value industries, it relocates lower-value production to “follower” economies in sequential waves. Production networks thus flowed from postwar Japan (the proverbial lead goose) to the four Asian Tigers to Southeast Asia’s emerging markets and a soon-soaring China. China's meteoric rise spun complex webs of supply chain linkages, fragmenting the classic paradigm.

This Article investigates the legal foundations undergirding the dynamics of Asia’s regional industrial policy. Unlike the European Union, which envisions a single, unified market to promote market access, integration in Asia started off first through production networks. A key feature has been supply chain coordination, articulated through production-sharing arrangements. In these arrangements, multinationals such as Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Samsung negotiated with ASEAN governments to divide up and allocate their supply chains among participating countries (for example, in automobiles, starter motors for Thailand, compressors for Indonesia, other electronic parts for Malaysia, so on). The ASEAN Free Trade Area, launched in 1992 to echo broader global trends in liberalization, did not erase but was layered atop these cross-border industrial coordination schemes.

Asia's foothold in global supply chains was thus not a story of unfettered free trade but cautious, coordinated expansion of trade that mitigated between global trends, regional opportunities, and national interests. Not all efforts were successful—many ASEAN economies have yet managed to upgrade. But the ‘fragmented flying geese’ paradigm, seen as not just an economic phenomenon but a series of legal experiments on regional industrial policy, can hold insights for the current international economic order, with renewed focus on state intervention and regionalization.