Collaboration results in NWO-WOTRO subsidy

The Erasmus School of Economics has won a €700k NWO-WOTRO subsidy for a 4-year project entitled: ‘Escaping the Middle-income country trap: targeted and pragmatic policies for technological upgrading and worker-inclusive industrial strategies as drawn from a firm-level analysis of the Philippines & Thailand’. <link people rob-van-tulder _blank>Professor Rob van Tulder, Academic Director of the <link erim research centres scope _blank>SCOPE centre for international business and sustainable development, will play an important role in the project.

Erasmus University will provide a counterpart funding of almost €400K to the project. The project will be executed in collaboration with the University of the Philippines and the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand.

The project focuses on economies caught in the ‘middle-income country trap’ (MICT), or those squeezed out of the global market by low-wage countries on one side, and by more technologically innovative economies on the other. They tend to grow sluggishly, produce and trade an extremely narrow range of goods/services, and depend on buyer-supplier relationships with multinational firms for global market entry. Since much of the literature on the subject is macro and institutional in nature, the project aims to study the micro indicators of MICT, conducting national firm surveys in the Philippines and Thailand, and zooming-in on two export processing zones, where firm, worker and household data will be linked. A development project involving 23 stakeholders will be piloted as well.