United Nations University-Comparative Regional Integration Studies

Since the end of World War Two, East Asian countries have oriented their trade relations towards the West. Intra-regional trade was very low for a long time and their major exports markets were in the United States and Europe. Even Japan was not a major destination for exports from South East Asian nations. Taiwan and South Korea, both former colonies of Japan, shifted their trade patterns away from exporting to Japan. While the communist states in the region were closed economies, the non-communist states maintained high trade barriers between themselves. Those counties looked to the multilateral trade system (MTS) as the preferred means to advance economic growth and development. There was no enthusiasm for constructing a regional trade block along the lines of the European model. East Asian countries were among the staunchest supporters of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which oversaw the golden age of trade liberalisation and economic growth in the post war era. ‘In GATT we trust ’ was the credo of East Asian countries. The World Bank (1993) attributed East Asia’