East Asia’s Pattern of Export Specialization: Does Indonesia Compete with Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore?

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the comparative advantage of East Asian countries (China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia) and to investigate whether Indonesia is competing in the similar groups of products - based on the 3-digit SITC Revision 2 for 237 groups of products published by the UN-COMTRADE. First, we calculate the Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage (RSCA) index to know the pattern of comparative advantage for each the East Asian countries. Second, we calculate the distribution of RSCA (value of mean, median, standard deviation and skewness of comparative advantage) from each the East Asian countries to analyze the dynamics of comparative advantage. Third, we examine the correlation of Indonesia’s RSCA with the RSCA of each the East Asian countries for the period 1995-2015 to determine whether Indonesia has a similar pattern of specialization and whether competing in the same product market with the East Asian countries. The result of the analysis shows that China is the biggest competitor for Indonesia, and Japan has very different patterns of specialization