Author: Claude Barfield, AEI

Recently, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Philip Levy and I published an International Economic Outlook, entitled ‘Tales of the South Pacific: President Obama and the Transpacific Partnership.’ In this analysis, we made the case for the Obama administration to move with dispatch in asserting U.S. leadership in the construction of a new Asian economic architecture that would be broad and inclusive. And we argued that the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) agreement was an ideal vehicle through which to achieve this goal.

Since then, bolder moves by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have increased the urgency for the Obama administration to advance a strategic vision of the U.S. role in a nascent Asian economic architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Ken Heydon, LSE

As the Doha Round flounders, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the centrepiece of trade diplomacy. The annual average number of PTA notifications since the WTO was established has been 20, compared with an annual average of less than three, during the four and a half decades of the GATT.

Such agreements, which now account for over half of world trade, share a number of characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Claude Barfield and Philip I. Levy, AEI

After prolonged ambivalence about trade, President Obama finally found an agreement he could embrace – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But what is the object of the President’s new found passion? Why has the South Pacific caught his fancy when pending agreements in Latin America and Northeast Asia could not? And will this amount to anything more than the Administration’s rather empty promises to wrap up the Doha Round of WTO global trade talks?

In fact, the TPP is potentially a significant addition to U.S. trade policy. It could be a model for trade liberalisation and a means to address long-standing U.S. interests in Asia. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Razeen Sally, ECIPE

It is perhaps time to revive the idea of a transatlantic free trade area (TAFTA). This is the gist of two papers, one by ECIPE’s Fredrik Erixon and Gernot Pehnelt, the other by GEM-Sciences Po’s Patrick Messerlin and Erik van der Marel. A TAFTA initiative was floated in the 1990s, only to sink; and the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), established at the initiative of Chancellor Merkel to tackle regulatory barriers, has become bogged down in micro-detail and hardly made progress. Sure, political obstacles are great, but it is worth stepping back to coolly assess costs and benefits, and then decide whether to go ahead with a new initiative.

First, consider the context of US and EU trade policy, especially in light of the global economic crisis. Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Hadi Soesastro (CSIS, Jakarta) and Peter Drysdale (ANU, Canberra)

The idea that regional architecture in Asia and the Pacific is not up to the tasks it now needs to serve has been around for some time. It has been inspired in part by worries about the untidiness in the competing structures — across the Pacific, of APEC, and within East Asia, of ASEAN +3 and the East Asia Summit (EAS). There has also been a hankering after ‘robust’ regional institutions modelled on the arrangements in Europe or North America, however unsuited they are to Asia Pacific circumstances.

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What is different about the thinking that led to Prime Minister Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal is that these worries are incidental to its main strategic motivation. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Luke Nottage, Australian Network for Japanese Law

Imagine a transnational regime with these institutional features:

• Virtually free trade in goods and services, including a ‘mutual recognition’ system whereby compliance with regulatory requirements in one jurisdiction (such as qualifications to practice law or requirements when offering securities) basically means exemption from compliance with regulations in the other jurisdiction. And for sensitive areas, such as food safety, there is a trans-national regulator.

• Virtually free movement of capital, underpinned by private sector and governmental initiatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: John Ravenhill, ANU

The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTA) in the Asia-Pacific region in the last decade has been primarily a top-down affair, driven by governments acting as much for political-strategic as for economic considerations.

The consequence has been a succession of poor quality, ‘trade-lite’, agreements, towards which the business community, the supposed beneficiary of such arrangements, has been largely indifferent. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Deborah Elms, Temasek Foundation Centre for Trade & Negotiations, Singapore

The ambiguity in U.S. President Barack Obama’s November 13th statement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks mirrors the somewhat torturous path in American trade policy to date on this topic. In his speech in Tokyo, President Obama said, ‘The United States will also be engaging with the Trans-Pacific partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional agreement that will have broad-based membership and the high standards worthy of a 21st century trade agreement.’

Listeners in the audience could be forgiven for confusion. Was the United States in or out? What did the President mean by ‘engage’?

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Ann Capling, University of Melbourne

At last week’s APEC meeting, United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced that the Obama Administration would participate in negotiations to establish a new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. This announcement means that the TPP negotiations – involving Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam – will now go forward, with the first round of negotiations to be held in Australia in early 2010.

The TPP is intended to be a high quality, comprehensive regional trade agreement that is consistent with APEC and WTO principles. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Yoshihide Soeya, Keio University

The victory of the Democratic Party of Japan in the House of Representatives election held on August 30 was an epoch-making event in the history of Japan’s postwar democracy. The two-party system has actually started to work, giving the Japanese people the option of changing government through elections.

Though the Liberal Democratic Party rule had been fraught with problems, the Japanese people had not placed enough confidence in the opposition parties to give them a chance to govern. The historic shift was apparently Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Amitav Acharya, American University

The just concluded Fourth East Asia Summit (EAS) in Thailand will long be remembered as the venue for seemingly competing ideas from Australia and Japan for reorganizing regional cooperation in Asia. But will it also be known for having altered the course of Asian multilateralism?

At one level, the two proposals, Australia’s Asia-Pacific Community, and Japan’s East Asian Community, are timely. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: William Tow, ANU & ASI

The newly elected government of Japan has already released its vision of how a regional community-building process could be pursued.

Yet Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been vigorously promoting his own vision of a regional architecture for the past eighteen months. The Australian leader could caution the Hatoyama government on the dangers of going too far, too fast in promoting any one grand vision for regional order-building. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Drysdale

The APEC Summit in Singapore is now just a month away. Each year APEC brings together the heads of government of 21 Asia Pacific economies to discuss issues of importance to the development, prosperity and security of a region that already constitutes more than half the world economy and is still its most dynamic centre of economic growth. Asia’s rebound from the global financial crisis confirms the region’s growing importance in the world economy. Next year, the APEC Summit will be held in Yokohama in Japan and the year after in the United States. The global financial crisis has seen the installation of the G20 Summit as the premier forum for international dialogue on global affairs and the fourth G20 Summit will be held in Seoul, cheek by jowl with the APEC Summit in Yokohama. The G20 includes the United States, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Canada, Mexico (all APEC members) plus India (a potential APEC member after the end of the moratorium on membership next year).

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Joel Rathus

Beijing, October 10, the heads of Japan, China and South Korea met at the Trilateral Summit.

Ten years since the first such meeting was held, established on sidelines of the ASEAN+3 as an informal breakfast, the summit has come a long way. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: Maria Monica Wihardja, CSIS, Jakarta

This post looks at the interaction between economic and political institutions.

A theoretical study of a simple strategic complementary game with private and public information among partially informed agents such as central banks shows that initial fundamentals might give rise to different levels of transparency. Read the rest of this entry »