The fast-growing last decade of strong economic growth of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has played a critical role in Asia-Pacific regionalism and global trade. This book explores the concept of ASEAN law under the normative framework of the new regional economic order. It examines the roadmap of the new ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025 by evaluating the impact of ASEAN trade agreements on domestic legislation on professional services, financial integration, investment disputes and digital trade. More importantly, it sheds light on the legal implications of ASEAN's agreements with China and India and the potential developments of mega-regional trade agreements such as the CPTPP and the RCEP. Hence, the legal analysis and case studies in the book offer a fresh view of Asia-Pacific integration and bridge the gap between academia and practice.
This collection of selected studies by well-known experts in major Asian countries surveys, discusses and analyzes emerging problems and challenges facing them. It proposes prescriptions for better regional economic integration and more effective economic management in the future. The book's area of study includes economics and business development, development economics, trade and investment, global competitiveness economics policy in Asia, globalisation, the WTO, and regional and international economic integration.
As Asia grows and prospers, its economies are increasingly vital to each other -and to the world. Led by a team of ADB staff, scholars, and advisers to regional policy makers, this study highlights what is at stake the emerging Asian regionalism and lays out the ground for further discussion on how to move forward.
'Too often analyses of East Asia are written by outsiders. the great merit of this broad ranging and well-conceived collection is to showcase original perspectives from China, Korea and Japan. As such, it is a welcome addition to the existing literature.' - Mark Beeson, the University of Birmingham, UK
Regional institutions are an increasingly prominent feature of world politics. Their characteristics and performance vary widely: some are highly legalistic and bureaucratic, while others are informal and flexible. They also differ in terms of inclusiveness, decision-making rules and commitment to the non-interference principle. This is the first book to offer a conceptual framework for comparing the design and effectiveness of regional international institutions, including the EU, NATO, ASEAN, OAS, AU and the Arab League. The case studies, by a group of leading scholars of regional institutions, offer a rigorous, historically informed analysis of the differences and similarities in institutions across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa. The chapters provide a more theoretically and empirically diverse analysis of the design and efficacy of regional institutions than heretofore available.
This book provides readers with a unique opportunity to learn about one of the new regional trade agreements (RTAs), the China–Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA), that has been operational since December 2015 and is now at the forefront of the field. This new agreement reflects many of the modern and up-to-date approaches within the international economic legal order that must now exist within a very different environment than that of the late eighties and early nineties, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created. The book, therefore, explores many new features that were not present when the WTO or early RTAs were negotiated. It provides insights and lessons about new and important trade issues for the twenty-first century, such as the latest approaches to the regulation of investment, twenty-first century services and the emerging digital/knowledge economy. In addition, this book provides new understandings of the latest RTA approaches of China and Australia. The book's contributors, all foremost experts on their subject matter within this field, explore the inclusion of many traditional trade and investment agreement features in the ChAFTA, showing their continuing relevance in modern contexts.
Asia is a crucial battleground for power and influence in the international system. It is also a theater of new experiments in regional cooperation that could redefine global order. Whose Ideas Matter? is the first book to explore the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system from the perspective of local actors, with Asian regional institutions as its main focus. There's no Asian equivalent of the EU or of NATO. Why has Asia, and in particular Southeast Asia, avoided such multilateral institutions? Most accounts focus on U.S. interests and perceptions or intraregional rivalries to explain the design and effectiveness of regional institutions in Asia such as SEATO, ASEAN, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Amitav Acharya instead foregrounds the ideas of Asian policymakers, including their response to the global norms of sovereignty and nonintervention. Asian regional institutions are shaped by contestations and compromises involving emerging global norms and the preexisting beliefs and practices of local actors. Acharya terms this perspective "constitutive localization" and argues that international politics is not all about Western ideas and norms forcing their way into non-Western societies while the latter remain passive recipients. Rather, ideas are conditioned and accepted by local agents who shape the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system. Acharya sketches a normative trajectory of Asian regionalism that constitutes an important contribution to the global sovereignty regime and explains a remarkable continuity in the design and functions of Asian regional institutions.
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism - the first of its kind - offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.
A New Global Economic Order: New Challenges to International Trade Law examines the dislocating effects of the policies implemented by the Trump Administration on the global economic order and brings together leading scholars and practitioners of international economic law come together to defend multilateralism against unilateralism and populism.