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 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...

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...

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...

The issue of decoupling is controversial. On the back of Asia's sustained high growth, the hypothesis that the region's business cycles would become increasingly independent of the global trend gained considerable attention. Asia was nonetheless hit hard by the global financial crisis and...

In this paper, we propose a panel approach in the construction of the Asia-Pacific Regional Cooperation and Integration Index (ARCII) to strengthen the index's ability to track the progress of economic integration in the region over time. Panel-based procedures are employed in imputing missing...

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...

Estimating regional integration faces challenges because of incomplete data from missing values and insufficient time spans. A key advantage of a dynamic factor model estimated using the Bayesian state-space approach is its ability to handle missing values and aggregation of the regional...

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...