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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.

This article focuses on regional-level cooperation in higher education by examining the functional, organizational and political approaches (FOPA) framework for higher education regionalization and using supra-national regional universities as established and successful examples of regional-level higher education cooperation among countries.

A conceptual framework is used to provide the structure for analyzing the key approaches to higher education regionalization, followed by an analysis of supra-national regional universities to demonstrate the application of the model.

The FOPA framework for higher education regionalization includes three approaches. The first is the functional approach, which includes both collaborative academic and research activities among higher education institutions as well strategies and policies to help align systems across a region. The second is the organizational approach, which focuses on networks, organizations, institutions and programs, which facilitate partnerships. The third is the political approach, which includes regional-level agreements, declarations and strategic plans to promote higher education collaboration. Key higher education activities for each approach are discussed in generic terms, with examples provided from major regions of the world.

The research was based on desk research only. No interviews were conducted.

A conceptual analysis and a model were provided for the concept of regionalization of higher education and for regional universities, which can help readers locate their interests and research in the regionalization of higher education. Examples of three different types of regional universities were provided to give concrete illustrations of a regional university.

One of the rationales driving regional universities is to address and increase a sense of regional identify and to meet the social, economic and educational needs of the specified region.

Regional universities, such as the University of West Indies, Arab Open University and the Pan-Africa University, are an understudied phenomenon. Using them as innovative and sustainable examples of higher education regional cooperation and the FOPA model, this study illustrates how single-campus, multiple-campus and virtual regional universities are functioning to meet the diversified needs and priorities across a region through cooperation among countries.

Arrangements for regional economic integration, under the WTO system, have unexpectedly dominated globalization. In fact, countries that have realized economic arrangements, such as the EU 's monetary union, are further expanding their efforts to achieve political integration. Regional economic integration is now considered an exigency of national affairs. North East Asian countries are also affected by this global predicament, but the issue involves greater structural complexities in this region. The emergence of China has forced Japan and Korea to contemplate difficult structural adjustments. For example, while the Korean government recognizes the importance of stronger intra-regional economic cooperation, by pursuing these arrangements it simultaneously faces the dilemma of maintaining traditional partnerships, such as those with the USA and Japan. If Korea actively supports regional economic arrangements, this action would be perceived as a bias toward China, consequently damaging ties with the US. Thus, rather than depending on public initiatives to establish economic ties in North East Asia, China, Japan and Korea should rely on market friendly projects initiated by the private sector that endorse gradual integration through non-political activities and exchanges among the citizens of the respective countries. This paper first proposes the founding of a North East Asian United University Community composed of students, professors and campuses of the three countries in the initial stages. Secondly, it proposes the development of unique Asian commodities, a concept similar to that of 'Airbus. ' Finally, it proposes utilization of retired Japanese, Korean and Chinese engineers and technicians to speed up the overall level of technology, which is critical to overcoming backwardness in this region.

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.

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.

This article offers an economic analysis of the main policy issues surrounding the proposed preferential trade area (PTA) between Japan, China, and South Korea. This initial assessment is done within the normative framework of customs union theory. Already, intra-regional trade between the three countries constitutes a high proportion of their total trade and is, in fact, cited as one of the main reasons for the PTA. As a consequence, trade creation following the PTA may not result in much new trade. However, it is expected that the PTA would lead to a vigorous growth of intra-industry trade, particularly in manufactured goods and components. Possibilities of trade diversion are real, but not insurmountable if the resulting preference structure is designed with a view to minimize disruption of trade with the rest-of-the-world.

The main goal of this paper is to examine the evolution of Latin American productive integration in terms of the regional value added incorporated in intra-regional exports of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. In addition, the study traces the trade and productive integration trajectories for each of these countries from 1995 to 2015.

Based on the use of OECD’s global ICIO input-output tables, this paper applies the methodological framework by Wang et al. (2018) for the analysis of trade flows at the bilateral level, which allows breaking down the value of gross exports of each sector-country, depending on the origin of the value added contained in exports, as well as their use.

The estimates show very low shares of value added from regional partners in the intra-regional exports of the countries studied. Conversely, the weight of the value added incorporated in these exports by countries outside the region has increased in tandem with China’s expanding involvement in Latin America. This development, along with the downward trend in domestic value added incorporated in exports, indicates a lack of a regional integration process of any depth.

This article addresses an economic problem of conventional importance from a global value chain perspective using a novel methodology based on the use of global input–output tables.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) flagship universities in moving the agenda of regional integration forward through academic/research collaboration and cooperation.

Flagship universities are leading universities in the national higher education systems of countries that make up the ASEAN. This study on the ASEAN’s flagship universities is based on a three-pronged strategy, namely, a literature review, analysis of websites contents, and citation of supporting pieces of evidence from other relevant studies to support arguments. Using the QS top universities in Asia 2016 listing, top 70 public universities in ASEAN were selected for investigation. In instances where public universities in a particular ASEAN country were not listed in the QS listing, a premier public university of that country was then selected for investigation.

There is a tendency for ASEAN’s flagship universities to look beyond ASEAN, primarily to establish vertical collaboration, which is important to their efforts in creating their image and enhancing their reputation. As a result, academic/research collaboration among flagship universities and collaboration between these universities and other universities in ASEAN is glaringly on the low side. Interestingly, to move the regional integration agenda in ASEAN, other intermediary agencies outside of ASEAN, such as in the European Union, are very active in providing a platform for both flagship and non-flagship universities to collaborate.

While regional collaboration and cooperation within ASEAN and East Asia have been discussed elsewhere, this paper has utilised and expanded Douglass’ (2016) idea of flagship universities to include regional relevance for the purpose of regional integration of ASEAN.

World trade has been increasing rapidly and much faster than world output. This study analyzes the trade structures of major dynamic East Asian countries as well as regional subgroups such as ASEAN members and Northeast Asian countries. Emphasis will be on the complementarities that would enhance integration among them through international trade. In addition, potential trade levels for each combination of East Asian countries are estimated by applying the gravity model of trade to the trade flows of21 APEC members, as a reference group. It is estimated to have significant potentiality by regional subgroup, ASEAN or Northeast Asia, and not between the two regional subgroups. However, the potential integration between East Asian countries in different regional subgroups is more significant by considering complementarities in trade compared with the results from the basic gravity model. To enhance economic cooperation between East Asian countries, expanding relationships such as inter-industry trade in natural resources trade and industrial goods between the regional subgroups needs to occur. They should also utilize complementary relationships from intra-industry trade in industrial goods such as electric and electronic equipment, related parts and accessories. And they should focus on the implementation of trade facilitation measures based on global standards.