Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. Would a free trade agreement (FTA) with the country be beneficial both economically and politically to the United States? What kind of benefit could Indonesia expect? This book presents a case for improved trade relations between Indonesia and the United States and recommends advancing exploratory talks toward a US-Indonesia FTA. The authors present a detailed study of the stakes involved in the various areas of the proposed negotiation and estimate the FTA's potential for trade creation, trade diversion, and welfare under different scenarios.
Chandra provides a political-economic analysis of the dynamic relationship between ASEAN economic integration and Indonesian nationalism. This book is suitable for those interested in contemporary Southeast Asian affairs.
The authors provide an overview of the preferential rules of origin in East Asia, highlighting the aspects that might possibly generate some trade-chilling effects. They review characteristics of existing preferential trade agreements with special emphasis on lessons from the European experience, and analyze some important features of the existing rules of origin in East and South-East Asian regional integration agreements. The empirical analysis of the effectiveness of preferentialism on intra-regional trade flows focuses on the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), with the aim of providing a rough estimate of the costs of requesting preferences. The results suggest that preferential tariffs favorably affect intra-regional imports only at very high margins (around 25 percentage points). This points to the likelihood of high administrative costs attached to the exploitation of preferences, particularly with regard to the compliance with AFTA's rules of origin.
The enactment of the regional economic cooperation scheme ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA) is an interesting phenomenon accompanying political-economic changes in the East Asian region. The regional economic cooperation scheme first proposed by then-Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji in 2000 was driven more by political considerations. China's rise as a global economic power was seen as a threat to ASEAN. Accordingly, China's involvement in regional forums is considered very important for ASEAN in creating regional stability. ASEAN-China FTA is an economic instrument, which is also part of ASEAN's political agenda to support regional stability. Indonesia, as the most influential country in ASEAN, supports regional economic cooperation, and always emphasizes the importance of ASEAN centrality in the face of uncertain changes in the world political economy. Unfortunately, Indonesia's support to ASEAN-China FTA, and Indonesia's stance on ASEAN centrality, turn out to be expensive in the socio-economic costs, namely: (i) Indonesia's unpreparedness in building the competitiveness of its economy, in line with the integration of the national economic system into the wider regional economy, and (ii) the economic unpreparedness actually caused by sharp differences of interest among domestic actors and exacerbated by the weakness of the government to overcome the differences.
This publication displays the menu for choice of available methods to evaluate the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It caters mainly to policy makers from developing countries and aims to equip them with some economic knowledge and techniques that will enable them to conduct their own economic evaluation studies on existing or future FTAs, or to critically re-examine the results of impact assessment studies conducted by others, at the very least.
Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have proliferated in East Asia as regional economies rush to catch up with the rest of the world — but what difference do they make? This book answers that question by providing an up-to-date assessment of the quality and impact of FTAs in the region. Featuring a collection of papers originally written for the prestigious Research Institute for Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in Tokyo, it presents contemporary analysis and insights into the evolution of recent FTAs. The book is suitable for use by trade policy negotiators, policy analysts, and people developing business strategies in organizations, as well as graduate students and researchers in the field.
