Best Practices’ in Regional Trade Agreements: An Application to Asia,” The World Economy

Regionalism in Asia, particularly in the form of free-trade areas (FTAs), is a recent trend that is becoming increasingly important. This has been disturbing to many, given the significance of trade and investment in Asian economic growth and development and the region’s key role in global commerce. Given this trend, the goal of this paper is to develop a blueprint, or a set of “best practices, ” that can be used as a guide to FTAs in order to ensure that they approximate first-best outcomes to the greatest extent possible. Next, the paper applies this framework to the existing FTAs between Asian countries and their regional and extra-regional partners. The results suggests that the more advanced regional accords generally receive high grades with the notable exception of rules of origin, which tend to be even more problematic in the context of accords including one OECD country than those that do not. *This paper is based on research that was supported by the Office of Regional Economic Integration (OREI) of th