 The Asian “Noodle Bowlâ€:Is It Serious for Business?Masahiro Kawai () and Ganeshan Wignaraja Working Papers from eSocialSciences Abstract: A lively debate is taking place over the impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) on East Asia's business between those who view the agreements as a harmful Asian "noodle bowl"—i.e., overlapping regional trade agreements—of trade deals and others who see net beneficial effects in terms of regional liberalization and a building block to multilateral liberalization. A lack of enterprise-level data has made it difficult to resolve the debate. Providing new evidence from surveys of 609 East Asian firms (in Japan, Singapore, Republic of Korea [hereafter Korea], Thailand, and Philippines), this paper seeks to address the critical question of whether the Asian noodle bowl of multiple overlapping FTAs is harmful to business activity, particularly for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).[ADBI WP NO 136] Keywords: regional trade; global financial crisis; economic downturn; Free trade agreements; GATT; WTO; ASEAN; PRC; ADB; APEC; rules of origins; Doha trade; JETRO; UNCTAD; GNI per Capita; Tariffs; economic integration; 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis; European and North American economic integration; FDI; MNC; trade liberalization; change in tariff classification (CTC) rule; value content (VC); ASEAN-PRC FTA; ASEAN-Korea FTA; and ASEAN-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA); SME; export (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:1936 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences |
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