There has been a series of calls at the international and regional levels for strengthening and rebuilding value chains since the outbreak of COVID-19. Although this is a natural consequence of efficient procurement, when their supply or distribution chains are concentrated in a few firms and a few countries, companies have always a legitimate concern as to whether they will continue to receive required materials and inputs from suppliers. Then, the question is where and at what stage the value chain is concentrated.

In response to this question, in a publication by the ASEAN-Japan Centre (Resilient Global Value Chains for ASEAN and its Relationship with Partner Countries, https://www.asean.or.jp/en/centre-wide/resilient_gvcs/), I calculated the degree of risks of value chains to external shocks and identified which industries tend to be more vulnerable to risks. Two types of risks — risks that affect the upstream part of global value chains (GVCs) (supplier market concentration) and those that affect the downstream part of GVCs (buyer market concentration) — are considered.

Looking at concentration by partner in the supplier market, China is by far the most important supplier to many industries in ASEAN. China occupies a market share that enhances its market power enough to cause a competitive concern in more than half of ASEAN member states’ standardized 222 industries (129). Japan occupies 38 industries. With regards to the buyer market concentration, China does not figure as the main buyer in many industries (only 11 industries where its market concentration is influential) and Japan 24 industries.

Further, I proposed a set of five strategies to build resilient GVCs in ASEAN. They include:

● Utilization of pandemic-related policy measures and actions implemented by ASEAN Member States

● Improvement in risk management by the private sector

● Strong push for digital transformation by both public and private sectors

● Promoting new and crisis-resistant industries

● Reconsidering company strategies for international production: offshoring or reshoring

For effectively dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and its economic aftermath, it is important for policymakers to resist the temptation of quick-fix solutions or protectionism and to maintain an overall favorable business climate.

Despite the rapid growth of social media and social networking service (SNS) advertising, empirical research on the effectiveness of SNS advertising is limited. Previous research has focused on the local market, and there are few studies examining the effectiveness of SNS advertising from a cross-cultural perspective.

This study is aimed to investigate the relationships among consumer’s beliefs about SNS advertising, subjective norm, attitudes toward SNS advertising, and consumer behavioral intention in different cultures. The survey research method has been used to collect data among social media users in United States and Japan. A structural equation model technique is employed to analyze the data.

The results show that credibility emerges as significant factor positively influencing attitude in both countries. And attitude toward SNS advertising emerges as the strong predictors of consumers’ behavioral intention in both countries. The effects of perceived informativeness, incentive, subjective norms influence on attitude to use demonstrate different patterns between the United States and Japan samples.

The research provides a better theoretical understanding of consumers’ behavioral responses to social networking advertising in international marketplaces.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that drive the acquisition and transfer of IJV shares by multinational corporations (MNCs) and local partners in international joint ventures (IJVs). Focusing on the dependence among the investing firms in an IJV, we develop hypotheses regarding the effects of local sales and local procurement of the IJV, as well as the MNC’s business experience in the host country, on the change in the shareholding of each investing firm in the IJV in question. The following trends were found in the analysis of IJVs in the manufacturing industry in Japan. (1) The higher the ratio of local sales and local procurement, the more MNCs tend to transfer their shares in the IJV to their local partners. (2) The higher the local procurement ratio of an IJV, the less likely MNCs are to acquire the shares of the IJV held by the local partner company. (3) When the MNC has long business experience in the host country, the relationship between the IJV’s local sales ratio and the MNC’s acquisition of the IJV’s shares from the local partner is positively moderated. (4) When the MNC has long business experience in the host country, the relationship between the local procurement ratio of the IJV and the MNC’s transfer of shares in the IJV to the local partner firm is negatively moderated. These indicate that although localization of sales and procurement, which are positioned downstream and upstream in the value chain, forms a dependency relationship between MNCs and local partner firms in manufacturing IJVs, MNCs may change this relationship as they gain business experience in the host country.