Special and differential treatment (S&D) allows differentiated treatment for developing countries within the WTO system by justifying a deviation from the most-favoured-nation obligation. Since it was incorporated into the GATT (the predecessor of the WTO) in the 1960s, S&D has played a...

Recently, there has been a surge in bilateral and regional trade arrangements between developed and developing countries, which are known as North-South RTAs. Under the current legal system of the WTO, North-South RTAs are governed by Article XXIV of the GATT or Article V of the GATS, which...

This report examines recent updates to the regulation and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights in Korea and China, in particular patent rights including invention, utility, and design rights. This paper also discusses some features and issues of the actual IP enforcement situation in...

Many specialists in international trade have started saying that the era of a mega FTA is approaching. If the three poles of the global economy, namely East Asia, EU and the United States, form mega FTAs, most of the volume of global trade will be covered. That may be fine, but there will be...

This paper investigates the impact of trade barriers such as customs clearance, subjective trade obstacles (customs and trade regulations), and inventory of inputs on the internationalization of enterprises in Southeast Asia and Latin America, using the World Bank's enterprise surveys. Empirical...

This paper empirically analyzes whether and to what extent the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines has affected their business cycle synchronization with the rest of the world. By employing the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model...

Unlike most existing studies, this paper examines the location choices of MNEs in developing countries. Specifically, we investigate the location choices of Japanese MNEs among East Asian developing countries by estimating a four-stage nested logit model at the province level. Noteworthy results...

Two new developments in the global landscape - growing concerns towards global warming and the rising prices of commodities – require countries to craft new growth strategies. These recent developments in the global market offer fresh industrial opportunities as well as difficulties for...

Production networks have been extensively developed in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper employs two micro-level approaches, case studies and econometric analysis, using JETRO's firm surveys which investigate Japanese affiliates operating in Southeast Asia. These two approaches found that...

We examine transport modal decision by multinational firms to shed light on the role of freight logistics in multinational activity. Using a firm-level survey in Southeast Asia, we show that foreign ownership has a significantly positive and quantitatively large impact on the likelihood that...