With new or updated trade agreements in place covering trade in North America, with Europe, and with many of its major trading partners in the Pacific Rim, Canada’s trade diversification strategy must increasingly look to the Global South. In the high-growth developing world, ASEAN stands out....

Canadian business and political leaders have long looked to strengthen bilateral economic relations with the ASEAN Economic Community based on its openness to trade, its dynamism and its integration into Asian production chains. Given the shift from an Asia-Pacific to an Indo-Pacific framing for...

Enhancing regional economic integration, both across Member States and with their neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region, has become an important priority in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Building on the ASEAN Free Trade Area, ASEAN has been implementing the ASEAN Economic...

This study seeks to investigate empirically the directional impacts of NTMs on intra-ASEAN exports given that not all NTMs pose constraints to trade. Though NTMs are found to be diverse and intense for specific bilateral pairs, there is no empirical evidence of adverse impacts of NTMs on...

This study seeks to enhance the understanding of ASEAN’s external preferential trade agreements (PTA) in context of the recent growth of economic regionalism in East Asia. First, the paper compares the content of ASEAN’s five plurilateral PTAs with China, Korea, Japan, India, Australia, and...

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...

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 paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper...

This paper shows that a regional bias resulting from trade integration alters the transmission of a countryś monetary policy by shifting the burden of the exchange rate adjustment towards the less integrated trading partners. I first develop a simple model which illustrates how a concentration...