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...

This paper reviews trends in East Asian regionalism in the areas of trade and investment, money and finance, and infrastructure. It presents various measures of trade and financial integration. An important finding of the paper is that increasing trade and financial integration in the region is...

Evaluating the economic impact of an FTA is an important part of the monitoring and surveying process that should follow the establishment of an FTA. This paper presents methods for evaluating the trade and welfare effects of an FTA. These methods show how to (i) compute indicators for the...

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 provides practical techniques to policymakers for evaluating the potential economic effects of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). To this end, the paper discusses how to apply three methods: (i) trade indicators, (ii) SMART (Software for Market Analysis and Restrictions on Trade) in WITS...

Theories of regional integration typically analyze the regional integration process from the perspective of a single discipline, usually economics. However, such one-dimensional analytical frameworks cannot fully capture the richness and complexity of the inherently multi-dimensional regional...

This paper argues that the way for the Philippines to the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) is not through ASEAN but through the world. Being good neighbors will define the AEC and how the Philippines fits into it-not necessarily in the way it was planned. Of the 4 pillars underlying the AEC, the...

Trade liberalization of the agri-food sector is a sensitive topic in both Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions. Using a general equilibrium model, we assess the potential impact of these agreements. The US agri-food sectors would...

This study evaluates the economic impact of the proposed COMESA-SADC-EAC Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) on 26 African countries. It uses the global trade analysis project (GTAP) computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and database to measure the static effects of the establishment of the...

The paper examines the effects of Russia joining the WTO taking into accountenergy sector reform and the impact of a future Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between theenlarged EU and Russia. The paper uses Computable General Equilibrium Modellingtechniques for quantifying the different possible...