Asia Regional Integration Center

Developing Asia's robust recovery from the global crisis is gaining further momentum, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) says in its annual flagship economic publication Asian Development Outlook 2010 Update. Strong export recovery, robust private demand, and the sustained effects of stimulus policies allowed the region to experience solid growth in the first half of 2010. This improved performance is broad-based and is projected to carry on for the rest of the year. Read the news release and highlights. Download the report. 

Emerging East Asia remains at the core of global payment imbalances. While the People’s Republic of China accounts for a substantial share of the region’s current account   surplus, Asia’s contribution to global rebalancing also depends on how the NIEs and  larger ASEAN economies respond to the crisis. In this paper, Charles Adams, Hoe Yun Jeong, and Cyn-Young Park argue that regional rebalancing will depend critically on the adoption of deeper and more comprehensive structural reforms with further trade liberalization that promote domestic and regional spending. Read more.

The objective of global regulatory reform is to build a resilient global financial system that can withstand shocks and dampen their effects on the real economy. Lessons drawn from the global financial crisis have led to specific reform proposals. Yet, these proposals have raised concerns of relevance to Asia’s developing economies. In this paper, Douglas W. Arner and Cyn-Young Park argue that global reforms should be complemented and augmented by national and regional reforms, taking into account the very different characteristics of emerging Asian financial systems from advanced economies. Read more.

John Ravenhill reviews the factors that have driven recent inter-governmental collaboration in the region, and the experience of existing inter-governmental institutions, to evaluate how strong a foundation they provide for deeper cooperation in the future. Despite the common emphasis on Asia’s market-led integration, state action has played a significant role in facilitating the growth of economic interdependence. Similarly, political factors have frequently been the dominant influence in inter-governmental economic collaboration. Read more.

Hyoung-Tae Kim, President of Korea Capital Market Institute, discussed the Korean experience in facilitating SME financing and lessons that can be learned by Asian policy makers in designing an efficient SME financing architecture. He argued that the vision and structure of SME financing has to be set according to the development stage of the institutions, markets and legal system of a specific country. Download the presentation.

Prema-chandra Athukorala examines the implications of global production sharing for economic integration in East Asia, with emphasis on the behavior of trade flows in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. The findings yield the inference that rise of global production sharing has strengthened the case for a global, rather than regional, approach to trade and investment policy making. Read more.  

Are trade facilitation measures under free trade agreements (FTAs) discriminatory? This paper by Shintaro Hamanaka, Aiken Tafgar, and Dorothea Lazaro addresses this important question by citing both discriminatory and non-discriminatory examples of actual trade facilitation provisions in FTAs. Read more. 

The spread of regional and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) in the Asia and Pacific region continues to gain momentum. From 54 FTAs in 2000, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has identified 233 bilateral and plurilateral FTAs as of July 2010. Of these, 90 are in effect, 25 are signed, 63 are under negotiation, and 55 are in the proposal stage. Follow the FTA Trends.