Launched as a political bloc and security pact in the aftermath of the Viet Nam War, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has evolved to embrace an ambitious economic agenda. Its latest project is to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 31 December 2015. Fulfilling these...

This paper uses directed bilateral flow data on multiple dimensions of economic integration to construct a composite index of regional integration outcomes covering 19 regions in various parts of the world. As a first step, the multidimensional indicator is used to rank regions according to...

Three case studies illustrate some of the secondary consequences of the search for energy security and its relationship to regional trade and cooperation: the role of the People's Republic of China, the emerging market in biofuels in Southeast Asia, and diverse feed-in tariffs for renewable...

As tariff barriers, of traditional and typical policy instruments in international trade, have been reduced significantly under preferential trade agreements as well as the multilateral trading system, non-tariff measures (NTMs), especially those of technical barriers to trade (TBT), become more...

This paper employs a modern global value chain (GVC) decomposition framework to quantify economic interdependence among Asian economies and between Asia and the rest of the world. It pays special attention to the value-added relationships among three sets of economies: those belonging to both...

Given different legal regimes which govern the global and regional trading systems, the WTO as such cannot stop the proliferation of RTAs. Nevertheless, the WTO can oversee them through its political and judicial review procedures. Notably, Article XXIV of the GATT, Article V of the GATS and the...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) presents strong potential to mold regional trade and investment patterns well into the future and to influence the direction of global economic cooperation at a challenging time. This paper evaluates the RCEP and estimates its potential...

Rules of origin differ among overlapping free trade agreements, raising firm compliance costs, discouraging utilization of trade preferences, and hindering regional value chains. Using a unique dataset comparing the restrictiveness of product-specific rules of origin (PSRO) between the Regional...

In order to argue that the proposed FTAAP is the second-best policy option for APEC member economies and the world economy com-pared to the stalled first-best multilateral liberalization effort like the DDA (Doha Development Agenda), we examine existing arguments for and against the proposed...

This paper attempts to provide a clear and comprehensive picture of trade integration in Asia, using a trade linkage diagram. The paper reviews four types of indicators (share, intensity, homogeneous intensity, and introversion index) and argues that the introversion index is the most suitable...