Asia’s Tiger economies are getting harder to follow

Despite the growing protectionist threat from the US, a combination of rising automation and the migration of some productive capacity into the cheaper interior mean that China is likely to remain a highly competitive export manufacturing centre for the foreseeable future. This will have big implications for low-wage Asian economies such as the Philippines, Indonesia and India, for whom the sort of labour-intensive, manufacturing-led growth that the Asian Tiger economies followed in the past, will be harder to duplicate.