We discuss the long-run economic impact of natural disasters on the countries concerned by examining the case of Thai flooding in 2011. If the damage caused by disasters is really serious, industries will move out from the countries in question, and this outflow leads to a negative impact on the...

Spatial designing of economic development with enhancing connectivity has become essential to pursue both sustained growth and the narrowing of development gaps. The issue of agglomeration and dispersion in China and its neighboring countries is an example of requiring such an approach. This...

Using a large firm-level dataset from the Chinese manufacturing industry, this paper studies the productivity gap and productivity convergence between large and small firms in China. We find that small firms are less productive relative to large firms, but the productivity gap became smaller...

Korea’s trade with most of its 46 free trade agreement (FTA) partner countries has been expanded continuously. Its FTA utilization ratios were as low as 20% before 2010, and some suspicions regarding the benefits of FTA were raised, despite the government’s active promotion. But Korea...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of one-sided tariff cuts on firms’ export product scope. The theoretical model explicitly incorporates cost of management in addition to the commonly used production cost. The analysis predicts that the home country’s...

In November 2012, the leaders of the ASEAN+6 countries agreed to launch a new FTA negotiation called the "Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership" (RCEP). In this paper, we conduct stocktaking studies of ASEAN's own FTA and five existing FTAs with 6 dialogue partner countries, to identify...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the success of progressive services liberalization under the ASEAN China FTA (ACFTA). First, we calculate the level of commitments by applying the Hoekman Index. Second, we compare the ACFTA 2nd Package with the ACFTA 1st Package and examine the additional...

ASEAN has established mutual recognition arrangements (MRAs) on eight professional services. This paper assesses the progress of these arrangements’ paying special attention to the (i) regional and national implementation, (ii) national regulatory changes, and (iii) utilization of these...

ASEAN Economic Ministers signed the Agreement on the Movement of Natural Persons (MNP) in 2012. This is a new instrument potentially facilitating the free flow of goods, services, investment, and skilled labour, thus contributing to the establishment of an ASEAN single market and production...

This paper empirically decomposes trade creation effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs) into those due to the tariff reduction effects and due to non-tariff barrier (NTB) removal by using the most disaggregated tariff-line level trade data in a large number of countries in the world....