East Asia is a region of great global significance, currently accounting for around 30% of the global economy by most measures, e.g. production, trade, investment and finance. It has also become increasingly integrated in various ways. Integration at the micro-level has steadily progressed since...

Regional economic integration is back in vogue following the "stumble" in the Doha Round in July 2008. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are driving this trend in Asia and the Pacific as well as in Central and South America, and the sheer volume of PTAs is striking. In the 1990s there were...

Emerging mega-integration blocs such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are evolving outside of the World Trade Organization’s influence. Their most contested features are their investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems. This article...

During the last century there has been a huge reduction in trade costs at almost every spatial scale impulsed not only by technological advances applied to transport and communication systems, but also by the spread of regional trade agreements and other related schemes. This estringent fall has...

The paper aims to examine economic interdependence and balancing power politics, and their mixed implications for regional institution building in East Asia based on the concept of common security. By pointing out the gap between the violent conflict prediction and the stability and prosperity...

This paper constructs agreement specific instruments in order to estimate the effect of membership in a regional cooperation agreement (RCA) on institutional change. For a sample of 144 emerging and developing economies, the results show that membership in a RCA explains a significant part of...

This study on the economic integration of the Euro-Med region was conducted from December 2008 to September 2009 under contract with the European Commission (TRADE08/C2/C16). The study provides quantitative, qualitative and sectoral assessments of the impacts of the Euro- Mediterranean free...

Energy security affects national security as well as the availability, extraction, and utilization of natural resources like water, agriculture land, and mining resources. Therefore, energy security is a nation's ability to meet the energy needs of its inhabitants uninterruptedly at an...

Digital trade facilitation refers to the application of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) to simplify and automate international trade procedures. It is rapidly becoming essential to maintaining trade competitiveness and enabling effective participation in cross-border...