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...

Theories of regional integration typically analyze the regional integration process from the perspective of a single discipline, usually economics. However, such one-dimensional analytical frameworks cannot fully capture the richness and complexity of the inherently multi-dimensional regional...

We use panel data consisting of 96 countries and covering the period 1960–2000 to investigate the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) and hub-and-spoke systems of FTAs on exports. Our empirical results imply an annual growth rate of 5.57% in exports, leading to a doubling of exports after...

Expanding trade with East Asia’s "Big Three" economic giants—the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and the Republic of Korea—offers a new potential source of growth for ASEAN in the post-global-crisis period. In fact, ASEAN has been actively pursuing trade liberalization with the...

Despite the central role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in global parts and components trade, most previous studies on the PRC’s parts and components trade have been limited to a particular trade partner or some specific industries. The central objective of this paper is to provide...

Using highly disaggregated, Harmonized System (HS) 8-digit, product-category level data collected by the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Customs Office for 2000 and 2008, we perform an in-depth anatomy of the PRC's trade in manufactured goods. First, we distinguish between foreign firms...