Regionalism as an Engine of Multilateralism: A Case for a Single East Asian FTA

Masahiro Kawai () and Ganeshan Wignaraja

No 14, Working Papers on Regional Economic Integration from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: As East Asia becomes increasingly integrated through market-driven trade and FDI activities, free trade agreements (FTAs) are proliferating. Consolidation of multiple and overlapping FTAs into a single East Asian FTA can help mitigate the harmful noodle bowl effects of different or competing tariffs, standards, and rules. A region-wide FTA will also encourage participation of low-income countries and reduce trade-related business costs, particularly for small and medium enterprises. A computable general equilibrium (CGE) model examines the economic impact of various types of FTAs in East Asia (among ASEAN+1's, ASEAN+3, and ASEAN+6) finding that consolidation at the ASEAN+6 level would yield the largest gains to East Asia among plausible regional trade arrangements.

Keywords: Free Trade Agreement; ASEAN; multilateralism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F13 F40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2008-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-int and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://aric.adb.org/pdf/workingpaper/WP14_East_Asian_FTA.pdf Full text (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:ris:adbrei:0014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers on Regional Economic Integration from Asian Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ivan B. de Leon ().