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The government of Korea considers the promotion of Free Trade Agreements (FTA) as necessary to develop its economy into an open trading nation. As for the countries with which the Korean government is actively investigating possible FTAs, there are Japan, Singapore, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN,) and Mexico. For the time-being, the FTA with Japan seems to be a critical one in practicing Korea s FTA policy. Recently, Korean industries show negative positions against a Korea-Japan FTA, with strong opposition from the labor union insisting that it is evident that Korea will sustain damages in the short-run and the dynamic (long-term) benefits are still ambiguous and uncertain. Regardless of whether their argument is correct or not, it will be difficult for Korea to conclude the FTA with Japan unless there is concrete confidence of balanced economic gains through the FTA between the two countries.

Since the financial crisis, East Asian countries have worked on bilateral/regional Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Currently, East Asian countries are working on over 30 FTAs. So far, the United States (U.S.) has exerted its considerable political and economic power in East Asia, but its political and diplomatic position is increasingly shaky for many reasons-emergence of China’s economic and military strength, growing regionalism in East Asia, weakening influence of the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) forum, and growing anti-American sentiment after the anti-terrorism war. The U.S. will be even more concerned about the development of FTAs in East Asia, since the country will suffer economic and non-economic losses when the East Asian regionalism is developed. This article evaluates a U.S.-Korea FTA in terms of U.S. involvement in East Asian regionalism, and tries to provide an economic assessment of the FTA. This article points out that the U.S. should take advantage of the U.S.-Korea FTA to secure its interests in East Asia and to avoid exclusion from East Asian regional economic integration.

Among various distinctive formulations that have been developed simultaneously in East Asia as of 2009, this paper selected three major paths, ASEAN+3, ASEAN+6 and APEC, to quantitatively examine the economic impacts of Asian regionalization with the CGE model. This paper confirmed previous findings such as the magnitude of economic impact being proportional to the size of membership and the existence of trade diversion effect within all trade blocs. The subsequent KORUS and Korea-EU FTA imposition upon the built CGE base models further verified the effects of hub-and-spoke-ism in East Asia. Jointly, the simulation results implied that the economic impacts of a trade arrangement heavily depend on the subject economy’s reliance on trade with the participating states. It was also found that the impacts were directly proportional to the accrued trade balance of the subject spoke country with both the hub state and the hub-destination. This could have been exaggerated as the scope of this study was limited to East Asia where KORUS FTA was found to be more influential than Korea-EU FTA due to its exceptionally high reliance on the US. On the course of this research to verify the aforementioned findings, however, both GTAP 6 and 7 were adopted, and hence, the economic impacts of China’s accession to the WTO in the global trade system were also empirically proven.

Building a large trading bloc tends to produce substantial economic gains, while minimizing economic losses from overlapping FTAs. East Asia has tried to generate the impetus for promoting region-wide trading blocs, but most of those blocs have been overlapped and multilayered. This paper reviews the evolution of East Asian regionalism from the APEC FTA under the 1994 Bogor Goal to recent RCEP promoted in 2013. This paper underlines that the continued expansion of multilayered trading blocs in East Asia works as a serious obstacle to regional economic integration, rather than exploring the realization of a region-wide trading bloc.

Since it is difficult for researchers to access data for the North Korean economy, they typically choose a proxy economy for estimating the economic impact of the unification of the two Koreas using a computational general equilibrium (CGE). This paper aims to identify the best proxy economy for North Korea out of the 140 economies (countries) in the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database version 9.1, which was published in mid-2015. (Ed- if your study aim is ‘to identify the best proxy economy for North Korea’, then you must state your study finding here in the abstract, and also in the conclusion, i.e., Romania) This paper evaluates the input-output (IO) tables for the North Korean economy in existing studies. Comparing the coefficients for North Korea in existing studies with those of the countries selected for this paper, substantial differences were found, especially for the services sector. This casts some doubt on the IO tables in the existing studies on the North Korean economy.

Although there is a growing number concerning articles/papers on China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR), it is difficult to find comprehensive research regarding the economic background in spite of the OBOR initiative involving multi-dimensional considerations. Although China targets to become a soft power leader by reviving the spirit of the old Silk Road, the OBOR is a large-scale investment project, whose rate of investment (ROI) is important for sustainability. Since new infrastructure in isolated regions is likely to be used less frequently, anticipated profitability is low. In spite of this risk, China promotes the OBOR for its economic and political purposes. China will promote the OBOR in spite of the U.S. withdrawal from TPP membership, since boosting aggregate demand is of critical importance for the country. This paper analyzes the economic background of the OBOR, which establishes China’s own model of regional integration, eases unemployment, and internationalizes its currency. Finally, this paper discusses diverse risks for China in the process of implementing the OBOR.

The major economies of East Asia, namely Japan and the Four Asian Tigers, have always prioritized the WTO-led multilateral trade liberalization over other trade arrangements primarily due to their unique economic structure with a high dependency on the world’s major markets such as the US. Along the same line, even the huge blow from the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 only managed to trigger a few initiatives to aide East Asian regional integration while being led by different centering bodies, APEC and ASEAN. These dispersed efforts naturally resulted in no realistically significant achievements in the light of ‘integration’ until the present day. Under these circumstances, East Asia now faces a second opportunity to achieve its economic independence from the extra-regional influences via regionalization: the 2009 Global Credit Crunch. This paper hereupon critically reviews the actual progress and the likely impacts of the current global recession on the East Asian region.

Discussion of unification was for several decades focused on the costs rather than the benefits for Korea, until reports emphasizing the latter were published by Goldman Sachs (2009) and various Korean think tanks over the past four to five years. Although these studies can be evaluated positively in pointing out the benefits of unification rather than the concerns about the costs, several questions can be raised. This paper tries to evaluate the quality and credibility of existing studies and suggests a new approach for estimating the impact of unification. It proposes a computational general equilibrium (CGE) model to be based on the social accounting matrix (SAM) and input-output (IO) table for the North Korean economy, in order to produce more reliable estimates of the benefits and costs of unification and the impact of various cooperative activities between the two Koreas.

The European Union (EU) has notified its revised Generalized System of Preference (GSP) on 31 October, 2012 which will come into effect from 1 January, 2014. The EU is also in the process of, or contemplating, to sign Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with many developing countries. Recently, EU has officially announced initiation of FTA negotiations with USA. Such preferential tariff arrangements could lead to significant erosion of preferences enjoyed currently by the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). In this backdrop, the main objective of the present study is to investigate the economic impacts originating from preference erosion in the EU market which could potentially affect LDCs in general, Bangladesh in particular. In this context, a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis has been developed by using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model and database to explore the aggregate impact of the preferential erosion as well as sectoral implications for which different partial equilibrium analyses were used. The analysis evince that if the EU eliminates all tariffs for Pakistan, India and Vietnam, Bangladesh's real GDP could decrease by 0.27 percent whilst welfare loss could be to the tune of US$ 54 million. Total exports to the EU will be reduced by 0.18 percent; consequently, Bangladesh’s terms of trade and exports of textiles and clothing could be fall by about 1 percent. The product level disaggregated analysis using RCA and unit price of major items also indicate that a number of products including textiles and clothing will be confronted with formidable market access difficulties in the EU.