This paper surveys recent literature on the design of international institutions and applies the insights from it to the prospects for regional economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. The political and economic heterogeneity of the region has served the process of regional economic...

After considering the background to the G20 summit meetings after the recent global economic and financial crisis, this paper aims to identify the trade agenda that represents Asia's concerns for the global and regional trading system. Asia, in particular East Asia, has played an important role...

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 a commonplace view that Asian regionalism lacks institutions, Asia, in fact, is full of regional institutions and frameworks in various forms. The rise and fall of regional institutions in Asia is an extremely dynamic process. Using a game theory approach, this paper hypothesizes that...

The many small sovereign states and multiple shades of sovereignty that exist across the present-day Pacific Island region are largely the product of the region's colonial history. Yet, the story of regionalism among the Pacific Islands began in pre-colonial times. This history, in turn, has...

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...

By the middle of this century, Asia's elderly population is projected to reach 922.7 million, and its share of population 17.5%, from just 4.1% in 1950. Within the next few decades, Asia is poised to become the oldest region in the world; reforming policies and creating new structures and...

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...

Viet Nam has experienced spectacular economic growth over the past decade, in part the result of massive foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Although much has been written on the impacts of FDI in developing countries, previous studies have generally ignored macroeconomic consequences in...

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...