Liberalization of Trade in Services: Toward a Harmonized ASEAN++ FTA

Hikari Ishido and Yoshifumi Fukunaga
Additional contact information
Hikari Ishido: Associate Professor, Chiba University

No PB-2012-02, Working Papers from Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)

Abstract: The East Asian countries are seriously discussing the consolidation of ASEAN+1 FTAs to develop so-called ASEAN++ FTA or RCEP. The detailed analysis of services chapters in the existing ASEAN+1 FTAs gives insights to services trade liberalization in this new trade agreement. In order for ASEAN and its FTA partners to gain substantial new commitments that are genuinely "plus" to the existing trade pacts, both WTO GATS and ASEAN+1 FTAs, ASEAN++ countries should aim at an ambitious level of liberalization much higher than the AFAS package 5. Also, the detailed analysis suggests a policy option of narrowing the types of services trade limitations, i.e., focusing on three types of limitations and hence improving transparency. Furthermore, we advocate for the needs of prioritizing production-related services sectors in the negotiation. Beyond ASEAN++ FTA, we briefly explain the critical roles of domestic regulatory reform.

Pages: 8 pages.
Date: 2012-03-01
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 (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eria.org/ERIA-PB-2012-02.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:pb-2012-02

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 ).