Rules of origin and development of regional production network in Asia: case studies of selected industries

Rules of Origin (RoO) are essential part of trade rules that become very important in the context of increasing globalisation of production process. Most industrial goods today incorporate inputs from a wide variety of countries (e.g. automobiles, electronic goods etc) and when traded it becomes important to determine their country of origin as tariffs depend on country of origin. The current study performs a critical investigation of RoO in selected regional trade agreements (RTAs) in the Asia Pacific region, and has made attempts to study linkages with intra-regional trade in some sectors such as textiles, electronics in the form of integrated circuits, and automobile components.