 Regional integration APEC style: Are there lessons to learn from regional integration EU style?No 869, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Abstract: The paper discusses similarities and differences between past EU binding internal liberalization „across the board“ in the industrial sector and present so-called voluntary sectoral liberalization of member states of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). While both approaches are second-best compared to unconcerted unilateral liberalization, the major disadvantage of liberalization APEC style in the industrial sector consists in introducing distortions between sectors as well as between member states due to rising disparities in timing liberalization within Asia Pacific. Such disparities raise problems of time consistency of liberalization under the so-called Bogor target of achieving free trade within APEC in 2010 (2020 for less advanced member states). Reliance on „peer pressure“ as the only mechanism to commit member states to liberalization is seen as a weak driving force to make APEC’s concerted unilateralism a stepping stone for the successor round of the Uruguay Round. The paper proposes a number of measures successfully applied in the EU to give APEC’s liberalization more „teeth“ to the benefit of multilateral liberalization. Keywords: trade liberalization; open regionalism; multilateral trade negotiations; regional integration (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:zbw:ifwkwp:869 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.