Science and Engineering Knowledge Production in ASEAN: Global Emergence, Fading Regionalism.

• Date: 01 April 2024
• Author: Stek, Pieter E.

1. Introduction

The member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have seen a rapid increase in knowledge production during the past twenty years. During 2016-20, the ten member states produced 2.8 per cent of the world's science and engineering articles (364,379 articles), as compared to 0.65 per cent of articles just two decades prior (33,036 articles during 1996-2000) (White 2021). However, ASEAN's knowledge production remains small compared to its 8.4 per cent of the world population (664 million people in 2021) and 3.5 per cent of world economic activity (US$3.35 trillion (1)) (ASEAN Secretariat 2022).

During the same period, ASEAN has seen a number of regional economic initiatives, including the creation of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2003. The AEC was set up primarily to make the region more attractive to foreign direct investment and to promote international trade (Ishikawa 2021; Plummer and Cheong 2009). These economic policies have led both to an increase in intra-ASEAN economic integration and to an increase in the global integration of individual ASEAN member states. This phenomenon reveals itself in areas such as international trade (Lun and Hoffmann 2016), stock market movements (Lestari 2020; Lim 2009), and business cycles (Sethapramote 2015).

This paper explores knowledge production in the member states from the perspective of ASEAN regional integration. Previous research showed that factors such as scientific, economic, geopolitical and cultural factors influence international research collaboration (Hou, Pan, and Zhu 2021; Jeck and Balaz 2020). Furthermore, evidence from the European Union shows that economic and political integration leads to the convergence of national knowledge production profiles and the strengthening of intraregional research collaboration networks (Grancay, Dudas, and Mura 2022; Makkonen and Mitze 2016). In the case of ASEAN, such integration appears to be lacking, as innovation policies at the regional level remain weak (Degelsegger-Marquez, Remoe, and Trienes 2018), and intraregional research collaboration has been declining from 1979 to 2010 (Kumar, Rohani, and Ratnavelu 2014). This leads to the main research question of this study: How have knowledge production and research collaboration developed in the ASEAN region, and to what extent is there a tendency towards regional integration and convergence?

This study uses a new dataset from the National Centre for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) in the United States (White 2021), which contains nationally aggregated scientific publications, research collaboration and citation data, including for all, or a number of ASEAN member states. The study addresses the research question through the lens of revealed comparative advantage--a relative indicator of knowledge output, research quality, and research collaboration, which is more suitable for comparative research (Fink et al. 2013; (Grancay, Dudas, and Mura 2022). It is also an approach that the author believes has not previously been applied to analyse knowledge production in the ASEAN region. Based on this analytical approach, the following research subquestions are addressed:

1. How has the knowledge output of ASEAN member states developed from 1996 to 2020?

2. What are the revealed comparative advantages of science and engineering research in ASEAN member states, and how have they changed from 1996 to 2020?

3. How have the international research collaboration networks of ASEAN member states changed from 1996 to 2020?

4. To what extent do ASEAN regionalism and globalization influence the knowledge production and research collaboration of ASEAN member states?

This paper begins with a review of the literature about knowledge production in the ASEAN region in the next section. This is followed by a description of the methodological approach and the data used in this study in the third section. In the subsequent section, the results of the scientometric analysis are presented, while the fifth and final section includes a summary of the findings, conclusion, and research limitations.

2. Knowledge Production in the ASEAN Region

Knowledge production in the ASEAN region has received some attention in the academic literature, although much less than knowledge production in the European Union. (2) Research on ASEAN has addressed various topics, including: the economic significance of knowledge production in ASEAN; international knowledge spillovers; the lack of regionalism; the importance of policies and institutions; and research efficiency. The relevant literature regarding these topics is briefly discussed in this section.

Among ASEAN countries, government R&D expenditure is highly correlated with other key economic indicators related to the development of a knowledge-based economy, including total factor productivity, labour productivity, and production of high technology production (Afzal, Mansur, and Sulong 2017; Kimura, Wong, and Ambashi 2019). There is also a strong relationship between scientific research and the knowledge intensity of economic activity (Nguyen 2011).

Furthermore, exports and non-capital imports from advanced industrialized economies through foreign direct investment are a key knowledge spillover channel for ASEAN economies. However, only countries with the necessary institutional quality are able to benefit from these spillovers, leading to increases in total factor productivity (Dogan and Wong 2020).

Similarly, the development of R&D activities requires policy support, and government interventions can enhance the technological significance and scope of innovation that takes place in ASEAN economies (Rasiah 2018; Wang 2018).

Despite the importance of policy in increasing R&D activity, regional innovation policy at the ASEAN level remains weak, and there is little evidence of regional integration of knowledge production, either in commercial R&D activity, or in basic scientific research (Degelsegger-Marquez, Remoe, and Trienes 2018; Lorenzo 2022; Payumo and Sutton 2015). Intraregional scientific research collaboration appears to be in a state of decline (Kumar, Rohani, and Ratnavelu 2014).

Comparative research on the efficiency of knowledge production in different ASEAN economies shows that high-innovation expenditure economies, such as Singapore, and low-innovation expenditure economies, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, frequently have the highest return on R&D investment (Afzal and Lawrey 2014; Dobrzanski and Bobowski 2020).

From an economic perspective, ASEAN countries can be divided into several different groups. There is a lower-income but high-growth group of countries, namely Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam. There is also a higher-income but low-growth group of countries, namely Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Among this latter group, Malaysia and Thailand are of particular concern due to their stagnant total factor productivity and the related risk of falling into a so-called "middle-income trap", whereby growth stagnates and countries fail to progress beyond upper middle-income status due to an inability to develop the innovation capacity needed to support higher value-added economic activities (Griffith 2011; Kimura, Wong, and Ambashi 2019).

Largely missing from the above analyses of knowledge production in the ASEAN region are studies on the revealed comparative advantages of knowledge production, and international research collaboration networks. Both are addressed in this paper.

3. Methodological Approaches and Data

The question of regionalism in ASEAN knowledge production can be approached from several different angles, including the similarities between the knowledge production profiles of countries (regional convergence), and the extent to which these countries are more strongly connected through international research collaborations (regional integration).

Regional convergence can be identified based on the similarity of the knowledge production profiles of ASEAN member states. A high degree of similarity indicates high convergence. Due to the large differences in size and economic development level, it is useful to compare states based on relative indicators. The relative comparative advantage was originally proposed for the purpose of comparing the trade specialization of countries (Balassa 1977), but has since been applied in scientometric studies as well (Fink et al. 2013; Grancay, Dudas, and Mura 2022; Mansourzadeh et al. 2019). In addition to calculating the revealed comparative advantage index for knowledge...