Asia Regional Integration Center

Expanding trade with East Asia’s “Big Three” economic giants offers a new potential source of growth for ASEAN. In this paper, Gemma Estrada, Donghyun Park, Innwon Park, and Soonchan Park aim to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the different permutations of ASEAN’s free trade agreements (FTAs) with the Big Three. The two types of analyses both suggest that an ASEAN+3 FTA would deliver the largest economic benefits for the region. Read more.

Fei Han and Thiam Hee Ng use a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model to forecast real GDP, inflation, short-term interest rates, real exchange rates, and real equity prices for five Southeast Asian countries. They find that the forecasts from the GVAR model tend to outperform forecasts based on country-specific models. Read more.

In line with its goal to foster economic growth and cooperation in the region, the Asian Development Bank, with Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, have collected a formidable group of scholars to describe how closely integrated Asian economies are and determine the real benefits of integration. Costs and Benefits of Economic Integration in Asia offers quantifiable results from the field's top economists on cooperation and integration in the areas of trade, investment, and finance in Asia. Download excerpt from the book. Read the book details.  

The recovery in the global economy will help the Pacific economies improve in 2011. The strongest gains are expected in the resource-rich countries that are benefiting from both major new resource projects and better world commodity prices, says the latest issue of the Asian Development Bank's Pacific Economic Monitor.  The report projects that the 14 economies of the Pacific will expand by 6.3% in 2011, up from 5.3% last year. Read the news release and the report.

The joint ADB-ADBI flagship study "Institutions for Regional Integration: Toward an Asian Economic Community" takes stock of existing institutions for regional cooperation and integration in Asia and the Pacific, and discusses the need for institutional innovation and reform in creating an Asian economic community.  Read the news release and executive summary. Download the e-book. 

This is ADB’s first training course focusing exclusively on regional investment agreements. The training course contributes to the capacity building of ASEAN Member Countries, particularly Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Viet Nam. ADB Thailand Resident Mission Country Director Craig Steffensen delivered the opening remarks. See program and participants’ list.

Edited by Michael Devereux (University of British Columbia), Philip Lane (Trinity College Dublin), Cyn-Young Park (Asian Development Bank), and Shang-Jin Wei (Columbia University), the book provides an up-to-date assessment of global and regional financial integration in Asia based on rigorous analytical frameworks and offers insight into the future of Asian financial integration. Read the book summary, flyer, and publication details.   

This publication by Plummer, Cheong, and Hamanaka displays the menu for choice of available methods to evaluate the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It caters mainly to policy makers from developing countries and aims to equip them with some economic knowledge and techniques that will enable them to conduct their own economic evaluation studies on existing or future FTAs, or to critically re-examine the results of impact assessment studies conducted by others, at the very least. Download the book.