What is SEZ ?
Sameer Medhekar
(Student)
(4140 Points)
Replied 20 January 2009
A Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is a geographical region that has economic laws that are more liberal than a country's typical economic laws. The category 'SEZ' covers a broad range of more specific zone types, including Free Trade Zones (FTZ), Export Processing Zones (EPZ), Free Zones (FZ), Industrial Estates (IE), Free Ports, Urban Enterprise Zones and others. Usually the goal of a structure is to increase foreign investment. One of the earliest and the most famous Special Economic Zones were found by the government of the People's Republic of Chinaunder Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. The most successful Special Economic Zone in China, Shenzhen, has developed from a small village into a city with a population over 10 million within 20 years. Following the Chinese examples, Special Economic Zones have been established in several countries, including Brazil, India, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. North Korea has also attempted this to a degree, but failed. Currently, Puno, Peru has been slated to become a "Zona Economica" by its president Alan Garcia. A single SEZ can contain multiple 'specific' zones within its boundaries. The two most prominent examples of this layered approach are Subic Bay in the Philippines and the Aqaba Special Economic Zone in Jordan. In a recent comprehensive econometric study[1] on the SEZ policies in China and India, Leong(2007) investigates the impact of opening up the Chinese and Indian economy on economic growth in these countries using new panel data sets for both the national economies and the regional economies of China. The policy change to a more liberalized economy is explicitly identified using instrumental variables. The results provide support that export growth does have a positive and statistically significant effect on economic growth in these countries. However, the growth rates of these countries are export and FDI inelastic, in the sense that a one percentage point increase in growth rate of export or FDI will have a less than one percentage point increase in economic growth rate of these countries. In the case of the Chinese regions, the presence of export processing zones may exert positive effect on the regional growth rate but the increase in regional growth is even more export inelastic than at the national level. The result dispel the popular view that adopting a policy of more openness in the economy has a “multiplier” effect on economic growth. Of the two phases of liberalization in both countries, the second stage is statistically significant. One possible reason is that the scale of liberalization is greater in the second phase. Additionally, increasing the number of SEZs has very negligible effect on economic growth. Taken together, these results suggest that what contributes to greater growth is a greater scale of liberalization, rather than increasing the number of SEZs. for more details click on the following link