ASEAN-plus-one Free Trade Agreements and their trade effects

This article reviewed ASEAN-plus-one free trade agreements (FTAs) by describing the backgrounds and issues in their formations, and by examining their trade effects through an empirical analysis. The empirics examined the trade creation and diversion effects of ASEAN-plus-one FTAs by estimating the gravity trade model for the recent two decades between 1993 and 2013. The estimation outcomes showed that the trade creation effect in ASEAN-China FTA (ACFTA) was much larger than those in ASEAN-Korea FTA (AKFTA) and ASEAN-Japan FTA (AJFTA), and that the trade diversion effects were commonly negative in ACFTA, AKFTA and AJFTA as expected. The larger trade creation effect in ACFTA might come from the wider gap between the general tariff rate and the preferential tariff rate for ASEAN in China