Bilateral and regional cooperation initiatives in Asia have been growing in importance over the last five years.These accords span the real and financial sectors; rather than following the more typical pattern of "trade first,money later", recent policy initiatives involve the simultaneous...

This paper reviews trends in East Asian regionalism in the areas of trade and investment, money and finance, and infrastructure. It presents various measures of trade and financial integration. An important finding of the paper is that increasing trade and financial integration in the region is...

This paper compares the economic integration processes of the European Union and the East Asian nations and comments on the possible reciprocal lessons, if any, that can be drawn in order to smooth the future paths of the two groups. On the EU side, institutions, structural policies, and the...

When debating the pros and cons of economic regionalism, haven't we focused enough on trade in goods at the expense of services? This article argues that regionalism is certainly a building block, not a stumbling block to a multilateral trading system, using the services liberalization scheme of...

Why is Asia lagging behind other regions in creating regional judicial institutions? What lessons from the operation of such institutions elsewhere could be valuable to Asian regional economic integration? I show that Asian states are not unusually averse to refer inter-state disputes over...

A common view holds that the trend toward Asian financial regionalism is a relatively new phenomenon that became significant after the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98. This paper challenges this view by exploring and analyzing financial regionalist projects in Asia throughout the 1990s. As...

The 1997/98 Asian currency crisis has led a once high-flying East Asia to realize its vulnerability to external shocks. This realization has given strong impetus to greater economic integration among East Asian economies, with the ASEAN-Korea Free Trade Area (AKFTA) a case in point. This paper...

Regional economic integration is both a deregulatory project, involving the removal of barriers to the movement of goods and services, as well as a re-regulatory project, involving the adoption of common economic, social, and environmental standards to enable the market to function. The removal...