ASEAN has significant achievements to its credit. It is a durable and effective functioning entity, more so than any other regional organization in the developing world. For a region characterized by great diversity and a history of conflict, ASEAN has played a role in delivering relative peace...

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...

The Asian countries are once again focused on options for large, comprehensive regional integration schemes. In this paper we explore the implications of such broad-based regional trade initiatives in Asia, highlighting the bridging of the East and South Asian economies. We place emphasis on the...

This paper studies the connection between trade and growth in the context of a partial and inconsistent liberalization process in a specific Eastern European country in transition towards market economy, namely, the Republic of Belarus. The analysis of the country trade patterns during the USSR...

I develop an index for economic integration accounting for its gradual and bilateral nature: the Gradual And Bilateral Integration (GABI) index. The graduality captures differences in the depth and path of five stages in economic integration and is an improvement over the use of binary dummy...

Three years ago, very few economists would have imagined that one of the newest and fastest growing research areas in international trade is the use of quantitative trade models to estimate the economic welfare losses from dissolutions of major countries' economic integration agreements (EIAs)....

Regional economic integration is back in vogue following the "stumble" in the Doha Round in July 2008. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are driving this trend in Asia and the Pacific as well as in Central and South America, and the sheer volume of PTAs is striking. In the 1990s there were...

This paper examines the relationship between mega-regional trade Agreements and diet-related health given that such Agreements aim to liberalize “substantially all trade and investment” that could potentially impact on health through tariff elimination and stronger intellectual property...