Intra-ASEAN trade has increased six-fold since 1993 but greater integration challenge looms in addressing non-tariff measures. The paper discusses the various ASEAN work programs on NTMs and assesses the incidence of Members' NTMs on various products. Various ways of accelerating the reduction...

The paper examines the labour migration trends in ASEAN and in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), in particular, and analyses the ASEAN regional labour-related initiatives that seek to improve the protection of migrant workers. It discusses social protection and the access status of GMS migrant...

Trade used to be about goods crossing borders and the instrument of protection was mostly through tariffs. Then there was greater recognition of trade in services, now exceeding the share of goods in global trade. Because of services, the focus of trade protection shifted more towards "behind...

This paper addresses the regulatory and policy environments conducive for e-commerce to thrive. In particular, as regulatory issues affecting e-commerce have become more prominent in recent regional trade agreements (RTAs), the paper seeks to investigate their role in setting the regulatory...

The paper analyzes how various preferential trading arrangements deal with agriculture liberalization and examines a few case studies highlighting the provisions on agriculture. It assesses the effect of preferential trade agreements on agriculture trade flows in the case of ASEAN. It finds that...

The study tries to shed some light on this linkage in the Philippine case.

We use newly collected data on trade and production in 178 countries to infer estimates of trade costs in agriculture and manufactured goods for the 1995-2010 period. The data show that trade costs are strongly declining in per capita income. Moreover, the rate of change of trade costs is...

Extensive research has demonstrated the existence of large potential welfare gains from trade facilitation - measures to reduce the overall costs of the international movement of goods. From an equity perspective an important question is how those benefits are distributed across and within...