Science Summit at United Nations General Assembly (UNGA78)

With 60 percent of the world population and 30 percent of the land, Asia’s share in global GDP has been increasing fast to contribute nearly 45 percent of the global GDP recently. Forecasters predicted that the share of Asia in global GDP will increase to more than 50 percent in the near future. Some of the Asian countries have been showing the signs of exorbitant growth since 1960s. Rapid industrialization happened in Four East Asian countries that tripled the real income per capita within a span of three decades. These countries had climbed the technological ladder while building and refining their indigenous learning capability and knowledge stock, with subsequently increasing their contribution in value chains. But these transformations are complex processes wherein numerous actors, organizations and institutions interplay for building innovation systems to generate high value added products and processes. With advances in ICT and transportation facilities, the production chains are increasingly getting fragmented into different regions, mainly to reap the production costs benefits and/or cater to large markets. Competitive production cost, availability of resources and investment friendly policies have attracted many multinational corporations and big conglomerates to establish production units in different latecomer countries in Asia. But the real challenge for these latecomer economies is to act upon the ‘window of opportunity’ emerged through entering the value chains; otherwise they can get struck in ‘low value added production processes’. Although the transformations are complex processes, but framing the necessary policies and adopting strategic means of accumulating knowledge can speed up the process. In this context, the panelists in the session will discuss the challenges for both the incumbents and the followers Asian countries in the post Covid-19 era of changing world economic order; wherein the world is found to be restructuring the value chains with re-shoring, friend-shoring and near-shoring bringing numerous opportunities and challenges for the latecomer countries.