Bilateral and regional cooperation initiatives in Asia have been growing in importance over the last five years.These accords span the real and financial sectors; rather than following the more typical pattern of "trade first,money later", recent policy initiatives involve the simultaneous...

In November 2002, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) committed itself to the creation of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), in which goods, services, capital, and skilled labor would flow freely by the year 2020, or possibly even 2015. Hence, the AEC will guide the ASEAN...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, now in negotiation among nine Asia-Pacific countries, could yield annual global income gains of $295 billion (including $78 billion for the United States) and offers a pathway to free trade in the Asia-Pacific with potential gains of $1.9 trillion....

ASEAN has been deepening intra-regional integration at the same time that it has been forming various cooperative arrangements with its partners, and its Member Countries have been pursuing individual trade accords. Which would be the optimal configuration for ASEAN? In this paper, we evaluate...