From Productive Transitions to Capability Accumulation: Evidence from Advanced Manufacturing in Thailand and Vietnam

Abstract

  Increasingly advanced production does not by itself establish capability accumulation, particularly when public documents reveal productive outcomes more clearly than the processes connecting them. This study examines how selected manufacturers respond to changing productive requirements and what documentary evidence permits researchers to infer about the retention and subsequent use of productive resources. A comparative longitudinal documentary analysis informed by process tracing examines five productive-transition episodes involving TLB, Meiko, SVI, and KCE in Thailand and Vietnam. The procedure separates documented transition states from the epistemic status of individual claims and assesses resource connections between distinct episodes.
  The cases document operation of selected transferred processes, planned expansion, reported mass production, cross-site knowledge coordination, and investment postponement. The examined sources do not sufficiently establish the temporal connections required to substantiate capability accumulation. This result identifies an evidentiary limit rather than an absence of accumulation. In particular, knowledge deployment across sites within one programme does not by itself establish resource continuity between distinct episodes.
  The study contributes an evidence-bounded procedure distinguishing production presence, productive transition, capability accumulation, and cumulative productive transformation. Stronger accumulation claims require evidence that resources associated with an earlier transition remained available and contributed to a later one. The approach supports assessment of specific documentary claims without treating differences in disclosure as differences in capability or ranking national productive systems.