Southeast Asia In The Wto

In this large-scale ISEAS study, Razeen Sally looks at Southeast Asia in the World Trade Organization, against the background of national trade policy trends post-Asian crisis, sluggish ASEAN economic integration, and the recent high-speed proliferation of bilateral and regional trade negotiations. ASEAN co-operation in the WTO has broken down, with little prospect of revival. Nevertheless, Sally argues forcefully that Southeast Asia needs a liberal, rules-based multilateral trading system; and that the WTO needs active Southeast Asian participation. ASEAN countries should forge multiple coalitions, revolving around the United States and China, to restore workability and purpose to a lame, crisis-ravaged WTO. This would provide headwind for what matters most: unilateral (national) trade-and-investment liberalization and pro-competitive regulatory reforms to revive and enhance policy competitiveness in the region.

Abstract: China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession will have major implications for China and present both opportunities and challenges for East Asia. Ianchovichina and Walmsley assess the possible channels through which China's accession to the WTO could affect East Asia and quantify these effects using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. China will be the biggest beneficiary of accession, followed by the industrial and newly industrializing economies (NIEs) in East Asia. But their benefits are small relative to the size of their economies and to the vigorous growth projected to occur in the region over the next 10 years. By contrast, developing countries in East Asia are expected to incur small declines in real GDP and welfare as a result of China's accession, mainly because with the elimination of quotas on Chinese textile and apparel exports to industrial countries China will become a formidable competitor in areas in which these countries have comparative advantage. With WTO accession China will increase its demand for petrochemicals, electronics, machinery, and equipment from Japan and the NIEs, and farm, timber, energy products, and other manufactures from the developing countries in East Asia. New foreign investment is likely to flow into these expanding sectors. The overall impact on foreign investment is likely to be positive in the NIEs, but negative for the less developed East Asian countries as a result of the contraction of these economies' textile and apparel sector. As China becomes a more efficient supplier of services or a more efficient producer of high-end manufactures, its comparative advantage will shift into higher-end products. This is good news for the poor developing economies in East Asia, but it implies that the impact of China's WTO accession on the NIEs may change to include heightened competition in global markets. This paper"a product of the Economic Policy Division, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network"is part of a larger effort in the network to assess the impact of China's WTO accession.

ø Policy makers will benefit from the expert knowledge and policy lessons presented in this book, and development economists and researchers will profit from its critical examination of the world trading system. Undergraduate and postgraduate studen

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are often considered as one of the building blocks for regional economic integration. This book details the concluded as well as ongoing FTA initiatives of Singapore, highlighting the benefits to the Singapore economy.

The Asia-Pacific region has witnessed a rapid rise in bilateral preferential trade agreements at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This trend could have potentially dramatic effects on the trading patterns of countries in the transpacific region and beyond. Some argue that these accords will spur multilateral negotiations, while others believe that they will irreparably damage the trading system. Bilateral Trade Agreements in the Asia-Pacific examines the underlying political and economic factors driving these accords, based on a novel theoretical framework. Experts then provide overviews of political and economic trends in the region as well as detailed analysis of the trade strategies of Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Mexico. By systematically evaluating and assessing the driving forces underlying the turn to bilateral trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of this crucial phenomenon. Growing numbers of countries both in the region and elsewhere in the world are now considering further negotiation of bilateral trade accords. Understanding how these arrangements will fit or conflict with existing institutions in the Asia-Pacific and the WTO makes this book imperative reading for policy-makers and scholars.

Food security is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The food price crisis of 2008 exposed the vulnerabilities of the global food system. Governments across Asia acerbated the crisis by imposing export restrictions based on a policy of self-sufficiency. This book assesses whether self-sufficiency is an adequate response to the food security challenges we face. Pricing volatility drives isolationism at a time when climate change and increasingly uncertain weather patterns make it difficult for any single nation to guarantee adequate food production for itself. Through a collection of commissioned studies which draw upon the experience of leading experts and scholars in trade, investment, law, economics, and food policy, this book analyses the impact of this trend on the most essential crop in the Asian region - rice. It suggests that food security policy should be reconceptualised: from the national to the regional and even the global level. It also provides its own proposals as to how this new paradigm of collective food security should be understood and developed. The book calls for a new conversation in the region, acknowledging that the challenges we face are global and the solutions must be found in collective action. This state-of-the-art study will appeal to lawyers, economists and political scientists, as well as food security specialists by providing expert analyses and enlightening solutions for the future.

This book is highly topical. The shift from the multilateral WTO negotiations to bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements has been going on for some time, but it is bound to accelerate after the WTO Doha round of negotiations is now widely regarded as a failure. However, there is a particular regional angle to this topic as well. After concluding that further progress in the Doha round was unlikely, Pacific Rim nations recently have progressed with the negotiations of a greatly expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement that includes industrialised economies and developed countries such as the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies such as Singapore, but also several developing countries in Asia and Latin America such as Malaysia and Vietnam. US and EU led efforts to conclude FTAs with Asia-Pacific nations are also bound to accelerate again, after a temporary slowdown in the negotiations following the change of government in the United States and the expiry of the US President’s fast-track negotiation authority. The book will provide an assessment of these dynamics in the world’s fastest growing region. It will look at the IP chapters from a legal perspective, but also put the developments into a socio-economic and political context. Many agreements in fact are concluded because of this context rather than for purely economic reasons or to achieve progress in fields like IP law. The structure of the book follows an outline that groups countries into interest alliances according to their respective IP priorities. This ranges from the driving forces of the EU, US and Japan, via Asia-Pacific resource-rich but IP poor economies such as Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies with strong IP systems such as Singapore and Korea to leading developing countries such as China and India and ‘second tier industrializing economies’ such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.