6
aa. Exports
The NIEs assume a solid role as leading exporters. With a
world market share of 7.4% in 1987, they follow closely Japan
(9.7%), Germany (12.4%) and the U.S. (10.9%). The NIEs export
three fourths of Japan's or two thirds of the U.S.' export vo-
lume.
2)
With higher growth rates than those of Japan, they are ex- pected to overtake Japan by 1989. Their exports haven't ex- perienced the cyclical ups and downs of raw materials and oil-
exporting countries. As it is mainly the manufacturing sector which serves as the engine of their growth, their export mar-
ket shares are well established. The share of manufactured ex-
ports in their total exports has reached 86% in 1986 (see An-
nex, Chart 1 and Table 3), while for the group of developing
countries this share of manufacturing exports in total exports
was less than half that value, just 41% in the same year.
The industrial countries reacted to this surge of manufactu-
ring products primarily with the erection of a wide array of
non-tariff barriers. Now, a growing proportion of internatio- nal trade is subject to those NTBs.2) As an importer of
manufactures from the Asian NIES, the EEC was in 1985 less im-
portant than in 1965; that is saying, the European markets
remained virtually closed, as external producers were in-
creasingly substituted by European suppliers. Only since the
dollar's fall in 1985 has this trend started to change.
The restrictive trade policy of the past has several major di-
sadvantages:
It pushes Asian producers towards higher value-added pro- duct categories which are not yet restricted, up the technological ladder. As that is precisely the area where
The OECD estimates the share restricted manufacturing imports in total imports in the U.S. at 6.2% (1980) and 12.7% (1983), while the percentage in the EEC rose from 10.8% to 14.9%. Over the same period, the percentage of restricted exports from Ja- pan and the Asian NIEs increased from 15% to 30%.
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