In May 2013 the ASEAN+6 countries began to negotiate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The objective of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of constructing such a region-wide agreement and to examine ways to multilateralize it. The paper first reviews free trade...

The withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in early 2017 led the remaining 11 countries in that trade and investment agreement to explore alternative ways to sustain economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region. This Working Paper shows that, without the...

This paper examines the impact of free trade agreement (FTA) use on import prices. For this analysis, it employs establishment-level import data with information on tariff schemes, that is, the FTA and most-favored-nation schemes used for importing. Unlike previous studies, this paper estimates...

The world's developed economies are experiencing a sharp backlash against globalisation, and it appears to be contagious. Will Asia catch it next? Asia has seen spectacular growth in recent decades. It has benefited substantially from global trade, finance, openness and the rules-based...

We examine the foreign direct investment (FDI) spillover effects in developing countries and investigate the importance of the absorptive capacity of a firm and a country in realizing and facilitating FDI spillover. We use data obtained from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys for 107...