The government has implemented substantial trade and investment policy reforms during the last two decades following a three-track approach involving unilateral, regional and multilateral modalities towards freer trade and investment. The reforms resulted to improvements in domestic resource...

Is the recent proliferation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in Asia a healthy development, or runs the risk of turning into an unmanageable "noodle bowl" in the future? The goal of this paper is to shed some light on this question. The results show that membership in the Asian RTAs...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the Asia-Pacific region have proliferated rapidly over the past five years and are creating a complex web of intersecting bilateral and regional trade agreements. This paper describes the proliferation of these PTAs, discusses their characteristics and...

Regional trade arrangements (RTAs) in Africa have been ineffective in promoting trade and foreign direct investment. Relatively high external trade barriers and low resource complementarity between member countries limit both intra- and extraregional trade. Small market size, poor transport...

This paper estimates a gravity model to address the issue of whether intra-Arab trade is too little. Although gravity models have been extensively used to measure bilateral trade among countries, they have—to the best of our knowledge—never been used to measure intra-Arab trade. Our results...

The Asian Economic Integration Monitor is a semiannual review of Asia’s regional economic cooperation and integration. It covers the 48 regional members of the Asian Development Bank. This issue includes two theme chapters: i) Toward an ASEAN Economic Community– and Beyond; and ii) World...

Regional integration has been seen in Africa as a means of encouraging trade and securing economies of scale. This paper examines in detail the prospects and challenges for trade expansion in the two most prominent arrangements in eastern and southern Africa: the Common Market for Eastern and...

This issue of the Journal is devoted to physical integration in Latin America. The Editorial Committee set about designing the contents with a call for papers, which suggested topics and questions that focused on the subject while covering a broad spectrum. Regional physical integration is...

The paper examines the policies pursued by the Philippines in response to the increasing economic integration and interdependence of nations and regions around the world, focusing in particular on the country’s multi-track approach to trade and investment liberalization. The country’s...