Asian Economic Integration Report 2021


Book Description

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted both supply and demand sides of an interconnected world economy in 2020. Asia and the Pacific was not immune as lockdowns and travel and trade restrictions affected nearly all aspects of cross-border economic activity. This publication examines the initial impact on trade, investment, finance, and people’s mobility across the region as the pandemic struck. It looks at how regional economies individually or collectively respond to the crisis by, for example, leveraging rapid technological progress and digitalization as well as increasing services trade to reconnect and recover. The theme chapter focuses on digital platforms and how they can accelerate digital transformation across the region.




Asian Economic Integration in an Era of Global Uncertainty


Book Description

The Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) conference series has been at the forefront of analysing challenges facing the economies of East Asia and the Pacific since its first meeting in Tokyo in January 1968. The 38th PAFTAD conference met at a key time to consider international economic integration. Earlier in the year, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and the United States elected Donald Trump as their next president on the back of an inward-looking ‘America First’ promise. Brexit and President Trump represent a growing, and worrying, trend towards protectionism in the North Atlantic countries that have led the process of globalisation since the end of the Second World War. The chapters in the volume describe the state of play in Asian economic integration but, more importantly, look forward to the region’s future, and the role it might play in defending the global system that has underwritten its historic rise. Asia has the potential to stand as a bulwark against the dual threats of North Atlantic protectionism and slowing trade growth, but collective leadership will be needed regionally and difficult domestic reforms will be required in each country.




The ASEAN Economic Community


Book Description

This is an important and timely volume: important because ASEAN is an increasingly significant and influential regional and global actor; and timely because, as the 2015 ASEAN Economic Community target approaches, what is needed is a sympathetic yet arms-length survey of the issues and challenges. ASEAN will miss some of the targets laid out in its AEC Blueprint, but the reader is left in no doubt that the ASEAN spirit is alive and well. The editors include a distinguished former Secretary General of ASEAN and the leading academic analyst of ASEAN economic cooperation. They and their co-editors are to be congratulated for soliciting contributions from an outstanding and diverse group of authors, and then adding their highly authoritative commentary and analysis. A must read for anybody seriously interested in ASEAN.




Asian Economic Integration Report 2015


Book Description

The Asian Economic Integration Report is an annual review of Asia's regional economic cooperation and integration. It covers the 48 regional members of the Asian Development Bank. This issue includes Special Chapter: How Can Special Economic Zones Catalyze Economic Development?




Economic Integration in Asia


Book Description

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) aims to achieve greater integration between the ASEAN region and its six free trade agreement (FTA) partners (India, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Korea). The RCEP is the only agreement to include three economies which are among the seven biggest economies of the world—China, Japan and India. The book opens with an introduction to the current status of economic integration and factors that would affect it and looks at key issues like non-tariff barriers, evolving investment regulations in China (in the context of FTAs), connectivity initiatives to integrate the region, rules of origin in the context of value chain integration in selected sectors as well as region-specific aspects of South Asia and South East Asia which would shape the regional economic architecture going forward. With an attempt to cover key imperatives, the book concludes by noting primary impediments to easier trade and investment flows in the region, highlighting possible policy recommendations to improve economic integration.




Indicator-Based Monitoring of Regional Economic Integration


Book Description

This volume brings together experts from different world regions. It presents various experiences with building indicator systems for monitoring the implementation of regional economic integration policies such as preferential trade areas, common markets or economic and monetary unions. The volume discusses both the technical and governance aspects of such systems, and best practices. The regional experiences that are covered include: the European Union, Eurasia, ASEAN, the East African Community (EAC), COMESA, CARICOM, the African-Caribbean-Pacific Group, and the Americas. In addition, various chapters discuss cross-cutting methodological challenges related to trade-related indicators.




Asian Economic Integration Report 2018


Book Description

This report documents Asia's progress in regional cooperation and integration. This publication documents Asia's progress in regional cooperation and integration. It covers the 48 regional members of the Asian Development Bank and analyzes regional as well as global economic linkages. The 2018 report's special chapter Toward Optimal Provision of Regional Public Goods in Asia and the Pacific examines how collective action among countries can help find solutions to growing transnational development challenges. The special chapter also discusses how to best provide regional public goods that transcend the so-called collective action problem which occurs when individual interests are too weak on their own to drive cooperation on common issues.




Asian Economic Integration Monitor


Book Description

The Asian Economic Integration Monitor is a semiannual review of Asia's regional economic cooperation and integration. It covers the 48 regional members of the Asian Development Bank. This issue includes a special chapter---Multilateralizing Asian Regionalism: Approaches to Unraveling the Asian Noodle Bowl.




Costs and Benefits of Economic Integration in Asia


Book Description

Costs and Benefits of Economic Integration in Asia brings together authoritative essays that identify and examine various initiatives to promote economic integration in Asia.




ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint


Book Description

On 28 July 2008, the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Regional Economic Studies Programme, both of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung organized a roundtable on The ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint. The brainstorming session gathered Southeast Asian experts from the region to discuss the AEC Blueprint, which ASEANs leaders had adopted at their summit meeting in November 2007, and the prospects of any obstacles to its implementation by the target year, 2015. The roundtable started with a progress report on the AEC Blueprint given by S. Pushpanathan, Principal Director of Economic Integration and Finance, ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta. Thereafter, the sessions examined the various aspects of the Blueprint tackling the non-tariff barriers, designing a comprehensive ASEAN Investment Agreement, a regional framework for competition policy, the role of infrastructure development in economic integration, the importance of international production networks in economic integration, etc.