We find that institutional quality of an individual country was highly and significantly correlated with its economic performance in the euro area. We argue that governance reforms proposed at present do not suffice to resolving the fundamental problems of the EMU governance system unless...

Mechanisms on regulatory coherence or good regulatory practices have emerged as one of the unique features of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the age of mega-regionalism. Led by the United States, for instance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (‘TPP'), now known as the Comprehensive and...

The political economy of international trade decision-making within the United States is complex and ever-changing. The debates over the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the associated efforts of the Obama Administration to obtain Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), highlight...

In spite of the ASEAN goal of harmonising national competition policies and laws, the ASEAN Member States (AMSs) adopt an array of different approaches towards a number of procedural and substantive competition law issues, including the substantive appraisal of vertical agreements. The question...

The issue presented is whether Chinese regionalism (quyu zhuyi), or new regionalism (xin quyu zhuyi), poses a threat to the multilateral world trading system. The question directly relates to the recent 2004 ASEAN-China accord, which proposes to establish the world's largest free trade area...

The paper discusses the pros and cons of capital account liberalization. Rather than contrasting liberalization and regulation of capital flows as irreconcilable antagonisms, we argue that capital account liberalization requires institutional and regulatory safeguards. Even though the...

It is common to find in the texts of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) around the globe, provisions incorporated mutatis mutandis from the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. The incorporation of a WTO provision under this expression makes it necessary to determine the likely effects of such...

The proliferation of regional trade agreements (“RTAs”) behoves all WTO members to assess the extent to which RTAs depart from fundamental principles in the WTO such as the most-favoured-nation (“MFN”) treatment in the GATT and in particular, the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to...

We develop an index to measure the degree of regional integration in Asia and the Pacific (48 economies in six subregions). The index comprises 26 indicators in six dimensions of regional integration, i.e., trade and investment, money and finance, regional value chains, infrastructure and...

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these...