Monitoring the Implementation of Services Trade Reform towards an ASEAN Economic Community

Philippa Dee

No DP-2015-44, Working Papers from Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)

Abstract: This paper assesses the extent to which the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Framework Agreement on Services (AFAS) is helping ASEAN member states achieve their ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) goal of free flow of services in the region. Even after eight rounds of services trade negotiations, the trade commitments lag actual practice. Thus, if the AFAS process is to do a better job of driving real reform, it will need to be more closely linked to the domestic policy development processes in each member country. One strategy would be to switch from a positive list approach to a negative list approach to negotiations. This could be the ‘game changer’; it would require a major policy review, and thereby allow countries to develop an overall services trade strategy anchored within the domestic policy development process. Other desirable changes would be a ratchet mechanism, whereby any future domestic reforms would be automatically bound into AFAS schedules, and a mechanism to ensure that whenever mode 3 commitments are made, the appropriate mode 4 commitments are also made. Supporting changes are also needed to domestic regulatory environments. For example, some ASEAN members need to improve the quality and enforcement of their prudential regulation if they are to make further progress in opening up their financial markets to foreign participation. Finally, it is critical to have regulatory frameworks that are conducive to contestability more generally, so that when foreign companies do enter the market, they do not have an unnatural AFAS-induced advantage over domestic new entrants. Thus, the key to making further real progress towards a free flow of services in the region is to focus on domestic regulatory improvement more generally.

Keywords: ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services; AFAS; services trade policy; services trade commitments; regulatory policy; regulatory environment; actual practice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages.
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eria.org/ERIA-DP-2015-44.pdf (application/pdf)

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:era:wpaper:dp-2015-44

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ranti Amelia ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).