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...

Are trade facilitation measures under free trade agreements (FTAs) discriminatory? This important question has yet to be sufficiently explored by the existing literature on trade facilitation. Despite the multilateral scope and non-discriminatory objectives of trade facilitation measures, some...

This paper presents a model in which final goods producers outsource intermediate input production. Intermediate inputs are differentiated and their production can be located at home or abroad. The model is used to examine competitive location policy in a (two-country) free trade agreement...

This paper evaluates whether the proposed FTAAP is a desirable policy option for APEC member economies and the world economy. More specifically, this paper qualitatively investigates whether the FTAAP satisfies conditions for a trade bloc to generate positive and sufficient net trade creation...

This paper presents a model in which final goods producers outsource intermediate input production. Intermediate inputs are differentiated and their production can be located at home or abroad. The model is used to examine competitive location policy in a (two-country) free trade agreement...

Trade policy in Asia has switched from non-discriminatory unilateral liberalisation, reinforced by GATT/ WTO commitments, to discriminatory FTAs. The paper surveys the FTA activity of the major regional players: China, India, the ASEAN countries, Japan and South Korea. It concludes that emerging...

This chapter suggests a rationale for a simple, scalable, and fast computational approach through the ‘Data With Direction Specification’ (DWDS) to supplement the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The specification provides a way for digitally executable...

This paper analyses the evolution of the South American Common Market, Mercosur. It shows how the lack of coordination of macroeconomic policies, especially of the two major participants (Argentina and Brazil), had caused trade strains and conflicting interests in attracting foreign investments....

Increasingly, in regional agreements, large economies, e.g. U.S. and E.U., offer lower trade barriers in exchange for cooperation by small economies in environmental, intellectual property and other issues. What is the effect of such agreements on multilateral trade liberalization? We show that,...