The role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in East Asia’s recovery from the recent global financial and economic crisis highlighted the PRC’s growing role as an engine of growth for the region. From the viewpoint of the PRC, there are many potential gains from entering into free...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) presents strong potential to mold regional trade and investment patterns well into the future and to influence the direction of global economic cooperation at a challenging time. This paper evaluates the RCEP and estimates its potential...

Institutional regionalization has come late to East Asia compared to Europe, but its pace has accelerated since the mid-1990s. Many agreements, including bilateral ones, cover an ever-increasing portion of the East Asian region, including China. We first analyze regional economic integration in...

The recent interest shown by the European Union towards the countries in South-east Asia, as well as the initiatives for setting up free trade areas in the region, come to confirm the uneasiness that portrays the situation at home, as well as the efforts that it set out to make in order to...

Within East Asia, the outward-oriented Philippine economy is a latecomer to using free trade agreements (FTAs) as a trade policy instrument and has relied heavily on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for regional liberalization. While negotiating FTAs has consumed scarce time...

In this paper attention is primarily focused on the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and, more specifically, on the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), which symbolises the recent response of the Southeast Asian countries to other, more advanced, instances of regional economic...

ASEAN has been deepening intra-regional integration at the same time that it has been forming various cooperative arrangements with its partners, and its Member Countries have been pursuing individual trade accords. Which would be the optimal configuration for ASEAN? In this paper, we evaluate...

Despite the intense interest concerning Rules of Origin (ROO) in every corner, research regarding ROO has been relatively limited. It is primarily due to the difficulties of performing systematic research on ROO. The importance of the role of ROO in FTA, however, cannot be overemphasized since...

Within East Asia, the outward-oriented Philippine economy is a latecomer to using free trade agreements (FTAs) as a trade policy instrument and has relied heavily on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for regional liberalization. While negotiating FTAs has consumed scarce time...

The paper argues that United States (US) participation in the East Asia Summit (EAS) — regional integration architecture led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — was motivated by four changes in the regional economic landscape: (i) the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and...