This paper examines how COVID-19 vaccinations change international trade. We analyze monthly level trade data from January 2020 to March 2022 that cover the bilateral exports from 40 reporting countries to 220 partner countries. Our findings can be summarized as follows. On average, the effects of vaccination rates in importing and exporting countries on exports were found to be insignificant. When considering the income level, we also did not find significant effects of vaccination rates in high- and low-income countries on exports. In contrast, the rise of vaccination rates in low-income countries significantly increased their exports though no significant increase in exports was detected when vaccination rates rose in high-income countries. These results imply that since low-income countries are mainly engaged in labor-intensive industries, the relaxation of lockdown orders (i.e., movement and gathering restrictions) driven by the rise of vaccination rates plays a crucial role in production activities in low-income countries.

This study examines COVID-19 pandemic effects on the stock market and exchange rate of South Korea. With daily data from January 2, 2019 to August 31, 2020, we show that a new infection spike increases stock price index volatility and decreases foreign investors' holdings of domestic stocks, and indirectly leads to the depreciation of the South Korean won. We indicate that investors may have repurchased the South Korean won seven days after an infection spike, thereby slightly increasing its value. We also find that the Bank of Korea's foreign exchange intervention had a short-run effect with a limited impact. The intervention did not have a significant effect on exchange rate volatility.

We investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on global value chains by examining bilateral trade in finished machinery products from January to June in both 2019 and 2020. We use the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths as measures of the impact of the pandemic. Specifically, we investigate how these impacts affect value chains in three scenarios-countries that import finished machinery products, countries that export finished machinery products, and countries that export machinery parts to countries exporting finished machinery products-to assess the impacts on demand, output, and supply chain, respectively. In our analysis, the largest negative impacts were from supply chain effects, followed by output effects. In contrast, we did not find significant impacts from demand effects. We also found that output effects are not so strong in intra-Asian trade compared with trade in other regions.

Manufacturing has long been the center of industrialization strategies for poor developing countries. This article first investigates the effects of labor supply constraints on industrialization, which may have been caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Then, it examines how manufacturing automation could affect industrialized developing economies based on the premise that manufacturers may accelerate production automation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The model predicts declines in developing economies' manufacturing competitiveness and a heterogeneous pattern of recovery from the COVID-19 recession. In comparison, developing economies with large manufacturing bases would recover relatively quickly, whereas those with weaker manufacturing bases would suffer from a long-term decline and manufacturing contraction trends (undesirable deindustrialization). Manufacturing automation can enhance economic welfare, causing a contraction in the unproductive nontradable good (service) sector. However, with low labor mobility, the welfare effect is ambiguous, thereby widening the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor.

"A notable distinction between population movement in China and that in other countries is that the former has been regulated by administrative authority.... In this paper, population movement forced by administrative power is referred to as policy-induced movement, whereas that caused by economic factors or disasters is regarded as spontaneous movement....This paper will analyze China's population movement over a forty-five-year period since the early 1950s by comparing policy-induced and spontaneous movement patterns."

"Post-revolution Iran adopted a development strategy centering around the three main tactics of controlling the expansion of Tehran, redistributing various functions to major regional cities, and promoting the growth of smaller cities in rural areas. The present paper will take up the problems pertaining to the urbanization ingredient of the new development plan by investigating if smaller regional cities have in fact during the post-revolutionary period been absorbing population surpluses created in Tehran; and if so, to what scale such population absorption is functioning."

"This paper will present an analysis of urban structure in the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, which formed as these regions evolved into so-called ¿newly industrializing economies' (NIEs).... In Korea and Taiwan [the process of] over-urbanization and expansion of primate cities was already under way during the colonial period; but in the postwar process of rapid industrialization, their urban structures began to change again, giving rise to characteristics not observed in other developing countries. The first task of this paper is to analyze these characteristics in terms of a NIE.... The second task...is to undertake comparative analysis of the two types.... In Korea the rise of ¿regionalism' and the formation of an urban poor social stratum generated serious social conflict. Analyzing these problems is the third task of this paper."

"Culturally, socially, and politically, the Philippines and Thailand are completely different, but in the economic sphere until the end of the 1970s, the two exhibited such similarity that they could have been called twins. During the 1980s, however, the difference in the economic progress of the two countries widened greatly.... Relying on field surveys, this study will try to further clarify the differences in the social structures of the two countries through an analysis of the effects that urbanization has had on the urban informal labor market. Essentially it seeks to comprehend the urban labor market by approaching from another angle Hara's argument that the labor market in the Philippines is extremely segmented while that in Thailand is one of free movement between sectors with educational attainment effectively acting as a signal of labor quality."

"This paper is aimed at presenting the salient features of the morphology of India's urbanization paying due attention to interstate variations. We will find a lot of variations among the states in terms of their basic indices of urbanization. There are six sections in this paper. Section II deals with how to define an urban area. Section III presents a picture of the patterns of population transformation in India with due consideration to changes in the birth and death rates over time. Section IV examines the main features of the morphology of India's urbanization, discussing the level of urbanization, primacy patterns, interstate differences in urbanization, and the components of urban growth. Section V deals with the structure and pattern of migration in order to explain the background to India's slow urbanization."

"This study will take up the particular aspects and characteristics of urbanization [in South Africa] from the standpoint of the effects exerted by the apartheid system. It will then examine the trends which have taken place since abolition of the pass laws and restrictions on the influx of blacks into urban areas....[The author considers] the relationship between restrictions on the movement of blacks into urban areas on the one hand and the maintenance of low-wage migrant labor and retention of farmland in home districts on the other."