Production networks have been at the heart of the recent growth in trade among East Asian countries. Fragmentation trade, reflected mainly in the trade in parts and components, is expanding more rapidly than the conventional trade in final goods. This is mainly due to the relatively more...

The authors analyze the patterns of East Asia's trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) from a global and intraregional perspective, taking into account the importance of trade and FDI interlinkages. They propose two regionally-focused approaches to promoting trade and FDI in East...

This paper documents how economies in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region have integrated financially with the rest of the world since the 1990s. First, the region is increasingly more connected with itself and with other economies. Although economies in the North capture the bulk of the...

Reform programs sometimes falter because they are politically infeasible. Policy change inevitably creates winners and losers, so those with vested interests strike bargains to determine how far and how quickly reform should advance. Understanding these micro political dynamics of reform can...

The authors show in this paper that increasing the transparency of the trading environment can be an important complement to traditional liberalization of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Our definition of transparency is grounded in a transaction cost analysis. The authors focus on two...

An export-oriented development strategy fostered the Asia Pacific region’s economic success, making it the fastest growing region in the world. In recent years, despite waning demand from the crisis-hit Western economies, the accelerating demand from China boosted intraregional trade in Asia....

The authors provide an overview of the preferential rules of origin in East Asia, highlighting the aspects that might possibly generate some trade-chilling effects. They review characteristics of existing preferential trade agreements with special emphasis on lessons from the European...

Over the past decade, regional integration has become the focus of intense global interest and debate, and the regionalization of East Asia has figured prominently in that dialogue. East Asia can be described as a heterogeneous region that is both global and intraregional. The authors examine...

This study's empirical findings have positive implications for further efforts to expand East Asian regional trade and cooperation initiatives. Since the mid-1980s regional intra-trade has grown at a rate roughly double that of world trade, and at a rate far higher than the intra-trade of the...

This paper provides an analysis of the two channels of regional integration: integration via markets and integration via agreements. Given that East Asia and Latin America are two fertile regions where both forms of integrations have taken place, the authors examine the experiences of these two...