The Philippines has been more cautious in its policy towards free trade agreements (FTAs) than other ASEAN member states, having signed, so far, only one bilateral agreement with Japan in addition to the various ASEAN+1 agreements. While the Government is expected to progressively reduce...

What is the impact of the removal of barriers to trade on the firms` innovative activities? Does the increase in competition arising from trade reforms lead to increases in innovation? This paper attempts to examine the link between trade liberalization and innovation using firm panel data on...

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been working toward the free movement of goods in the region. Although significant progress has been made in the opening up of markets through tariff elimination, addressing the issues on nontariff measures (NTMs) remain. With the reduction...

Free trade agreements (FTAs) and regional trade agreements (RTAs), as a national policy, have proliferated in the recent decades as countries perceived trade agreements to effectively reduce trade barriers, thus helping expand market access, protect local markets, and enhance efficiency and...

To understand the design of JPEPA and EFTA, notably the similarities with other FTAs of Japan and EFTA-member countries, respectively, and how these similarities affect Philippine trade, the study proposes the use of text-of-trade-analysis, that is, text analysis employing textas-data. The paper...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a forward-looking trade agreement between member economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its free trade agreement (FTA) partners (AFPs) namely Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and New Zealand (i.e., non-ASEAN...

As the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) seeks to promote free trade and economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, cross-border ICT-enabled services and business process outsourcing (BPO) are expected to contribute to economic integration and growth in the region. ICT-enabled...

The ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint targets an ASEAN single market in 2015. This is an ambitious reform agenda that seeks to ensure the free flow of services, investment, and skilled labor along with the free flow of goods and the freer flow of capital in the ASEAN region. For logistics...