Suchergebnisse

Free trade agreements in Southeast Asia -- Contents -- About the Author -- Chapter 1: Features of FTAs -- Chapter 2: Singapore's FTAs with New Zealand and Australia -- Chapter 3: Singapore's FTAs with Japan and EFTA -- Chapter 4: Singapore's FTA with the United States -- Chapter 5: Ongoing Individual Country FTA Initiatives -- Chapter 6: Ongoing ASEAN-wide FTA Initiatives: China, Australia/New Zealand, Japan, and India -- Chapter 7: Possible Benefits of FTAs for Southeast Asia -- Postscript -- Selected References.

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are often considered as one of the building blocks for regional economic integration. They specify a set of rules or standards that govern trade among the members who are signatories to these agreements. However, by definition, FTAs tend to be discriminatory and are often considered to be hindering rather than facilitating the goal of achieving global free trade. In the context of Southeast Asia, consumers and businesses must understand in what way a bilateral FTA might affect them, given that this is hitherto an unknown trend to most of the region. This book attempts to create a conceptual understanding on the features and benefits of FTAs proliferating in Southeast Asia. It focuses on the debate of whether such FTAs are a building or stumbling block towards achieving global free trade. The book details the concluded as well as ongoing FTA initiatives of Singapore, highlighting the benefits to the Singapore economy. It further details the other ongoing ASEAN-wide FTA initiatives, both at the bilateral and regional levels, and analyses their implications for the economies of Southeast Asia. The book observes that it is important to understand the exact nature of the gains from trade when entering into such agreements, given their wide scope and diverse nature. This is the first book in the ISEAS Southeast Asia Background Series

AbstractAlmost all participants in free trade agreements (FTAs) exclude at least a few products or sectors from complete tariff removal on the exports of their FTA partners. The positive tariffs that remain within an FTA are often the highest tariffs that the countries apply on an MFN basis. It seems plausible that such exclusions may be chosen because the domestic producers of these products are viewed as especially vulnerable to competition from imports from the partner country. In brief, they are especially "sensitive sectors." We develop this idea theoretically and then test it empirically on data from 37 countries in 240 importer–exporter pairs within FTAs. We find support for the sensitive‐sector hypothesis only in the high‐income countries. We find that low‐income countries, in contrast, exempt sectors where bilateral tariff removal would be more likely trade‐diverting and therefore harmful. Our explanation for this, supported empirically, is not that they are following the advice of trade economists, but rather that they are avoiding loss of tariff revenue and may also perhaps be influenced by the greater bargaining power of richer and/or larger partners in their FTAs.