DE FACTOANDDE JUREREGIONAL ECONOMIC INTEGRATION IN EAST ASIA: HOW DO THEY INTERACT

Françoise Nicolas ()
Additional contact information
Françoise Nicolas: French Institute of International Relations, 27 rue de la Procession, 75740 Paris Cedex 15, France

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2010, vol. 55, issue 01, 7-25

Abstract: A salient feature of the East Asian region is the persistent discrepancy between the progress inde factoandde jureeconomic integration. East Asia has long been said to be the champion of loose regional economic integration, with deepening intra-regional trade and investment linkages in the absence of any formal cooperative scheme. However, an oft-heard claim is that East Asia has been shifting recently towards an institution-based form of regional economic cooperation, primarily as a result of the 1997–98 financial crisis. Next to post-crisis financial cooperative schemes under the ASEAN+3, the surge of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) involving East Asian countries is thought by some to further substantiate this claim. The objective of the paper is twofold; first, to assess the validity of the aforementioned claim; and second, to examine the links betweende factoandde jureeconomic integration in East Asia compared to other regions of the world. In the process, the sequencing between trade and monetary cooperation is also addressed. The paper starts by providing a candid assessment of the current state of play of economic cooperation in East Asia (de jureintegration), both from the trade and the financial/monetary perspective, and highlights the limitations of the formal regional integration movement in East Asia to date. As a next step, it explores the changing nature of intra-regional trade and investment linkages, contrasts it to the situation in other parts of the world such as Europe and examines to what extent this new form of interdependence may be instrumental in making formal regional economic schemes more attractive. A major conclusion is thatde factotrade integration may not automatically lead to deeper regional trade cooperationde jureand that its impact is likely to be stronger on monetary cooperation projects.

Keywords: Regional economic integration; FTAs; RTAs; fragmentation; financial cooperation; international monetary arrangements; foreign exchange policy; East Asia; F13; F15; F31; F33; F36; F59; O19; O24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217590810003584
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:serxxx:v:55:y:2010:i:01:n:s0217590810003584

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217590810003584

Access Statistics for this article

The Singapore Economic Review (SER) is currently edited by Euston Quah

More articles in The Singapore Economic Review (SER) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().