The inaugural Policy Insight, "Towards an East Asian Free Trade Area", by Shujiro Urata, looks at the progress towards and consequences of an East Asian FTA, not only for the region itself, but also the world economy and for non members of the FTA. It discusses a topic of immediate relevance to...

In this paper we examine the changing nature of Japan’s commercial policy over the last 25 years while reviewing Japan’s changing structure of trade, FDI and economy that underlay policy changes. We argue that until the late 1990s Japan adopted a two-track approach of relying on...

In this paper we examine the changing nature of Japan’s commercial policy over the last 25 years while reviewing Japan’s changing structure of trade, FDI and economy that underlay policy changes. We argue that until the late 1990s Japan adopted a two-track approach of relying on...

In this paper, we measure the costs for utilization of free trade agreement (FTA) tariff schemes. To do that, we use shipment-level Customs data on Thai imports, which identify not only the firms, source country, and commodity, but also the tariff schemes. We propose several measures as a proxy...

We examine the firm-level impact of the use of free trade agreement (FTA) schemes on import prices by employing firm-level import data that enables us to identify the use of different tariff schemes, such as FTA schemes and most favoured nation (MFN) schemes. Unlike the previous studies, we...