The 'Flying geese development' model of the IT industry in East Asia

The IT industry developed in the United States and was then transmitted to Japan and further to Taiwan, South Korea, and China. Adopting the 'Flying Geese development' model as its analytical framework, this paper examines the development of the IT industry and the changes in the exports and imports of the five economies. This paper estimated comparable time series data on the production, export, and import of IT goods and IT services separately for the five economies. It found that the US has already reached the reverse import stage for IT goods while East Asian economies are at the export stage. Furthermore, only the US exports IT services to the other four. It also provides an econometric analysis of the mechanism of international transmission of the IT industry. This paper also takes into account foreign direct investment, OEM, and mobility of IT specialists into the analysis and refers to the possibility of leapfrogging.