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The economic success of East Asia was due to an export-led growth strategy, which was heavily dependent on the global trading system underpinned by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In recent years, however; East Asian countries have shifted their trade policy focus to regional agreements and made Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) among themselves arid with other regions. Government organization has been restructured to increase FTA activities. Generally, the current literature predicts that FTA activities of East Asia would help to increase the welfare of the region. In this paper; we offer a critical assessment of East Asia FTAs. We note that East Asia FTAs provide incomplete coverage of sectors and are likely to lead to an inefficient resource allocation. FTA movements are not matched with actual trade flows. The benefits of East Asia FTAs are fairly limited and potential benefits, if any, would not likely be materialized in the near future. Our overall assessment is that the recent policy shift in East Asian countries from multilateral trade orientation or unilateral action to regionalism or a parallel multilateral and regional trade approach will not produce much gain. The governments should increase their efforts at economic reform and reduce barriers to trade and investment, rather than to allocate more resource and manpower to FTA activities.

The proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) will become a large trade agreement in Asia, which has brought together the ten members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and five of the neighbors’ countries. Under the trend of globalization, the progress of the transportation industry and regional integration will increase the volume of trade, therefore maritime performance is intrinsically linked to trade. In fact, few studies have examined regional integration in the context of seaborne. This paper aims to use the cluster analysis and Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood (PQML) gravity model to investigate the trading bloc phenomenon and relation between trade and marine transportation.

In this paper, hierarchical clustering analysis and tree diagrams are used to identify functional areas characterized by bilateral trade intensity and bilateral liner shipping connectivity indices. Regional reorganizations that have occurred within Asian countries were studied. This study illustrates that these trading blocs have a positive impact on trade when maritime transport, production and trading networks have developed between regions. A gravity model was constructed using worldwide trade data for 2007, 2010 and 2015. The study considered free trade agreement (FTA)/common market (CM) of EU, RCEP and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as regional dummies and designed a real trade bloc induction variable. In addition, the study did not use the commonly adopted ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation but used the PQML method to estimate the gravity equation to overcome the problem of a large number of zero trade observations. Preliminary results show that regional integration cannot guarantee the establishment of intraregional trade but depends on the stage of economic development and regional industrial characteristics.

The major findings are summarized as follows. Both liner shipping connectivity and logistics performance have significant advantages with positive coefficients in each regression results. The creation of intraregional trade is not guaranteed, depending on the characteristics of the trade and the stage of economic development of the region. For RCEP, the effect created by intra-regional trade is better than the EU. Instead, the “nominal” intra-RCEP trade was significantly below the “real” trading blocs. For RCEP, the effect created by intra-regional trade is better than that of the EU. Instead, “nominal” intra-RCEP trade is much lower than “real” trading blocs. The real trading bloc between East Asia and Taiwan clearly exists, and the bloc phenomenon is becoming more and more significant. This result shows that Taiwan’s trade flow with East Asia is higher than the normal level relationship implied by its corresponding economic and geographical conditions.

This paper focuses on new empirical work done for this study is on the potential impact on trade. Earlier studies that have discussed and/or provided estimates of the benefits to the RCEP plan from improved transport and supply chain connectivity are cited. Marine transportation performance inherently links to economies of commerce. Few studies have examined regional integration in the context of maritime transportation, which reflects the lack of a mix of trade economists and maritime logistics research in the existing literature. This paper attempts to investigate the trading bloc phenomenon formed by regional integration (such as RCEP) and the relation between trade and marine transportation. With the official entry into force of the RCEP in 2020, it will promote increased trade and demand for logistics and maritime transport services in East Asia.

This paper aims to explore the contours of the future intellectual property (IP) protocol of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement.

This paper frames the IP protocol within the architecture of the AfCFTA Agreement, meaning that it will follow the structure of other protocols and will be guided by the Agreement’s foundational principles and objectives. With the place, shape and form of the protocol so established, the paper considers the substantive aspects that ought to be addressed. It also considers provisions on technical assistance, capacity building and cooperation.

The paper finds that the Tripartite Free Trade Phase 2 IP agenda is a credible starting place, which must be broadened to better meet gendered challenges and the continent’s developmental priorities. This will entail including provisions on specific aspects enumerated in the paper, which must be aligned with provisions on technical assistance, capacity building and cooperation to enhance implementation. The best outcomes in the negotiation, adoption and implementation of the IP protocol will be achieved by an inclusive approach incorporating all national, sub-regional and regional institutions guided by coherent policy and coordinated to ensure efficiency in resources and capacity mobilisation.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to formally consider both the architecture and substantive provisions of the future AfCFTA IP protocol with specific focus on gendered dimensions.

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.

Economists along with policy makers are generally viewing trade agreements as a “second best” process for trade expansion and economic growth on a global scale. The current surge of preferential trade arrangements on a bilateral basis, particularly in Asia, is somehow challenging such common view. The following paper is based on updated rough facts and put forward that the standard economic approach is a bit flawed. Obviously, the outcomes and prospects for Asian countries seem much more problematic insofar as power asymmetry and discrimination are embedded in these agreements.

This paper examines the impact of regional and non-regional trade on economic growth using annual data from Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member countries for the period 2007 to 2017.

Trade data were decomposed into regional (trade among ECOWAS Member States) and non-regional (trade between ECOWAS Member States and the rest of the world). We used the dynamic system GMM to estimate the models and introduced exchange rate, unemployment rate, population growth and gross capital formation as controlled variables.

The results revealed that the estimated coefficient of ECOWAS regional trade is statistically significant and positive in predicting growth, while the non-regional trade coefficient is negative and not statistically significant in predicting growth. Other predictors of growth introduced into the model as controlled variables, such as exchange rate, unemployment rate, population growth and gross capital formation, displayed mixed results. More importantly, population growth, unemployment and exchange rate depreciation hurt economic growth, while gross capital formation promotes economic growth.

The findings provide strong support in favour of the Krugman (1991) hypothesis that regional trade agreements (RTAs) are a better alternative to global trade.

Our decision to disaggregate ECOWAS trade is unique and influenced largely by the objective of the study, which is to establish the type of ECOWAS trade that is a good predictor of growth. The evidence from our findings support the theory that RTAs are a better catalyst to economic growth.

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 paper examined the future prospects of China’s economic development and its impact on the East Asian Economy and the economic integration of the region. The key issue to China’s economic growth is the contradiction between the socialist political system and a market-based economy. The overall assessment is that China will be able to manage the transformation of the nation into a steadily growing market economy.

We also found that China is the key country forming a triangular trading block which has implemented the international division of labor in the North-East Asian region. China’s rapid export growth and increased market share in the world economy is not a threat but a new opportunity for the East Asian countries. The rise of China will certainly be accompanied by an expansion of a consumer market, which will also broaden business opportunities for East Asian.

Despite the interdependence between East Asian countries, a regional trading bloc embracing East Asia has not been created yet. The future prospects for realizing the vision of a regional free trade agreement in East Asia in the foreseeable future is not bright, either.

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.