Since emerging as a leading industrial economy, Japan has played an important role in promoting Asia Pacific economic cooperation. Japan has been instrumental in every major initiative in economic cooperation in the region over the past three decades, including the Asia Pacific Economic...

This paper presents a simple model of industrial upgrading as a result of backward and forward information linkages between upstream and downstream relations. It also serves as an empirical investigation of the impact of mutual knowledge exchange on the knowledge production function using data...

This paper studies how East Asia’s trade composition and orientation have changed over the past decade and analyzes the implications for the region and beyond. Over the last 2 decades we have witnessed the emergence of regional and global supply chains, in which production is divided into...

The spread of regional trade agreements (RTAs) in Southeast Asia has ignited a debate about their impact on business, and ways to avoid raising the business costs from the Asian ‘noodle bowl’ effect. This paper undertakes a comparative and firm-level analysis of the impact of RTAs...

The economic rise of Japan in the 1980s was underpinned by commitment to catching up through domestic reform and accommodated externally within the framework of the postwar multilateral institutions like the GATT/WTO. Regional cooperative processes like APEC later complemented that framework,...

The results highlight the conflicting interests of countries — to stabilize exchange rates or to keep the option of exchange rate depreciation in order to maintain competitiveness of domestic tradable producers. With deepening integration in East Asia, however, the desire for exchange...

This paper studies factors associated with firm participation in export markets, focusing primarily on firm size and access to credit, based on a survey sample comprising observations of 8,080 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (with fewer than 100 employees) and non-SME firms in developing...

This paper investigates the effect of regional borders on trade in Asia. The regional borders define the three regions of Asia : South, Southeast, and East Asia. Regional trade indicates the flows of trade within a region, whereas regional border trade means trade across regions. A gravity model...

The Australia–United States free trade agreement (AUSFTA) came into effect in 2005. It was the second preferential trade agreement that Australia signed, after its agreement with Singapore, and marked a departure from the primacy of Australia’s previous trade policy of unilateral...

Confronted by the current global economic crisis, Taipei,China’s economy has suffered much like its neighbors. However, Taipei,China is different from other East Asia economies in several aspects. First, Taipei,China’s industrial organization is dominated by small and...