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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.

The Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2010 exposed the existence of significant imperfections in the financial regulatory framework that encouraged excessive risk-taking and increased system vulnerabilities. The resulting high cost of the crisis in terms of lost aggregate income and wealth, and increased unemployment has reinforced the need to improve financial stability within and across countries via changes in traditional microprudential regulation, as well as the introduction of new macroprudential regulations. Amongst the questions raised are:What are the challenges to prudential regulation?How has the regulatory environment changed in recent years?How do the reforms interplay with market discipline, risk-taking incentives and risk management arrangements?Does the new regulatory framework allow for the introduction of financial innovation, and the associated benefits, without increasing disruptive financial risk?

As global production has become dispersed worldwide, so have concerns for the plight of workers employed in the world factory. Standard economic intuitions prescribe sharp tradeoffs between the worker-level benefits that a job confers, and the number of such jobs that are ultimately made available. Such quality-quantity tradeoffs have taken center stage in the global debate on potential benefits and costs of legalizing and enforcing international labor standards. This volume organizes and presents a number of new developments in the economics of international labors standards. The first part of this volume explores a series of labor market institutions particularly in developing country labor markets so far unexplored in international labor standards debate. These include the presence of middlemen market power, the persistence of interlinked debt and labor market exploitations, and the origins of two-tiered labor markets. These studies unveil the determinants of workers' well-being and the associated justification for labor market policy interventions when institutions are lopsided favoring contractors, moneylender-cum-employers, and/or select workers blessed with "good" jobs. The second part explores the effectiveness of policy intervention by explicitly recognizing policy implementation challenges. These include coordination failure in the international context, imperfect enforcement and compliance of national labor regulations, and the limits of market-driven fair trade programs. In doing so, these studies shed light on the pitfalls of wholesale international labor standards prescriptions, and advocate instead in favor of case-by-case approach which duly recognize the specific ways in which the labor market deviate from standard assumptions, and the realities of policy implementation and enforcement difficulties.

Dimensions of Trade Policy collects the author's significant works on international trade policy over almost 30 years of publishing. The articles cover an eclectic range of topics but are grouped into three main areas of concentration — local content protection, the economics of preferential trading areas and the relationship between trade and competition policies — and the book also includes some sui generis topics, such as "fair trade" and "buy local" schemes. An introduction ties the chapters together and indicates their relevance to contemporary matters in trade policy.

International Economic Integration and Domestic Labor and Environmental Performance brings together the essays of Mary E Lovely focused on the relationship between international economic integration and domestic performance. It is a collection of sole-authored and co-authored papers that have been published in various scholarly journals over the last two decades. The first section considers the welfare effects and optimal design of retail sales taxes when consumers can avoid taxation by crossing jurisdictional boundaries. The second section highlights the role of scale economies in the design of industrial policies and as a determinant of firm location. The third section explores the influence of environmental policy on foreign investor''s location decisions and the role of trade and technology on country''s environmental regulation. The final section considers the determinants of wage differences, the attraction of low wages for foreign investors, and misallocations of labor in an emerging economy ΓÇö China.The collection, taken as a whole, highlights the power of international factor mobility to determine domestic tax burdens, to influence welfare implications of domestic policy alternatives, and to influence the location of productive factors and their rewards.

The Legal and Economic Analysis of the WTO/FTA System presents a collation of interdisciplinary studies covering a wide range of issues from WTO dispute settlement issues to trade remedy systems and FTA negotiations. The author applies legal as well as economic rationales and methods to analyze core issues in the world trading system and in doing so, sheds an interesting light on various trade issues. The interdisciplinary analysis on WTO and FTA issues provides a unique opportunity to reconsider many conventional trade topics. For instance, the author shows that third country dumping rarely used in the GATT/WTO system may have a new role with economic incentives in the context of FTAs.

The aim of the book is to provide interested readers with access to a number of articles that have been written over the years on the subject of the linkages between domestic farm policies (particularly in developed countries) and world markets for agricultural goods.

Trade Law, Domestic Regulation and Development is about the relationship between trade, regulation and development. By combining law and economics perspectives on the international trading system, Trachtman takes an interdisciplinary approach in analyzing the topic of globalization and economic development.In a developing economy, as globalization proceeds, a critical factor is the relationship between liberalization of movement of goods, services, and people, on the one hand, and the right to regulate, including the right to regulate for development, on the other hand. In the context of market access, all countries need the right to restrict imports of goods or services that may hurt consumers or the broader society, and developing countries sometimes need the ability to subsidize their own goods and services, or sometimes to restrict imports of goods or services, in order to promote development. Nonetheless, both developed and developing countries often fall into the trap of regulating for protectionist or corrupt reasons. Finding the right balance between market access and regulation is the subject of analysis in this collected volume of 16 papers by Trachtman, and presented in a manner that is accessible and interesting to both law and economics readers. In Trachtman's own words, 'The purpose of [international] trade law in this context [globalization] seems to be to allow states to agree to avoid creating these inefficient policy externalities, not to force all states to dance to the same tune.'

Brings together a collection of papers that Robert M Stern and his co-authors have written. This collection addresses a variety of issues pertinent to the global trading system. It deals with globalization in terms of what the public needs to know about this phenomenon and the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Education and media services have much in common. Both provide services that embody local cultures, in which there is extensive public sector participation and significant domestic regulation. At the same time, both are dramatically affected by the information and communications technology revolution. The production of information content now involves huge costs in terms of research and development or artistic talent, whilst the cost of making such products available to other consumers is very low. This in turn challenges the effectiveness of domestic regulation and raises fundamental questions about its purpose, calling for an increased scope for international trade and investment, and the development of supply chains.Yet, both areas are lightly committed in international trade agreements like the GATS. This lack of commitment and the lack of additional impact from negotiations in bilateral discriminatory trade agreements are cross-cutting themes in the book.Trade Policy in Asia responds to these issues to provide readers with a comprehensive and consistent treatment of policy in the higher education and media services sector across a range of Asian economies little studied in the existing literature. The book opens the discussion with an overview of global trends in each area, followed by detailed, country-specific studies. Through comparative work, it identifies common elements across these sectors and highlights critical implications for trade policy.Education services themes include the growth and impediments involved in various forms of trade and investment; the emergence of a 'new wave' of globalization; obstacles faced by domestic providers in supplying services; a common ambition to become an education services hub for international students; and the scope for greater international cooperation in research.Media services themes include the impact of new technology on options for content delivery and the associated problems for policy implementation and copyright protection, and the new challenges of globalization for social goals relating to local cultures, as well as risks involved in implementing policies that pursue these goals.

International Trade, Distribution and Development brings together a collection of papers that have sought to assess empirically the impacts of policy measures affecting trade. The carefully selected papers analyze the impact of trade barriers and their removal, with a focus on distributional consequences and economic development.Grounded in rigorous empirical analysis, this book covers a range of policy issues such as impacts of trade on wages, non-tariff barriers, trade preferences, export survival and carbon labelling. An invaluable reference for readers seeking to understand the impact of trade policies, the book also seeks to shed light on future research, especially for research on developing countries.

This volume includes many of Edward D Mansfield's contributions to research on the political economy of trade.

Non-Tariff Barriers, Regionalism and Poverty is a collection of key articles in three important areas of applied international trade research: measuring non-tariff barriers and their effects, the consequences of regional trading arrangements, especially on the countries excluded from them, and the connection between international trade and poverty. Drawing from 30 years of research and experience, L Alan Winters illustrates the development of techniques of this field and his continued commitment to answering real policy questions at the times at which they are debated. The collection shows the ways in which economic and econometric analysis can be used to answer real-world problems rigorously in the area of international trade and trade policy. Readers will find that some of the research included is of current methodological relevance and some of more historical significance. This volume is invaluable to anyone who is keen on developing their knowledge on trade policy, regionalism or poverty ΓÇö three pressing issues in today''s globalized world.

Services markets remain highly regulated and international trade and investment is restricted. Previous works have identified the scope for significant gains from trade, yet those results are often debated and the progress on reform has been slow. Parts I and II in Priorities and Pathways in Services Reform help fill the gap in the research around this debate. Part I ¿ Quantitative Studies contains up-to-date assessment and evaluations of the impact of policy in a range of services markets in different countries (through cross-country modelling of the impacts of a reform program). Part II ¿ Political Economy Studies builds on this to address the understanding of what makes a reform successful, going beyond a quantification of the benefits of reform. This book fills that gap by reporting and reviewing the experience of reform across different sectors and countries. Ten key lessons are identified for successful reform. Readers will find fresh insights into managing complex issues in services reform.

Offers a variety of perspectives on various forms and developments of international trade and related activities for Japan, the United States, China, and some other important trading countries, to develop different methods and data for measuring the factor contents of emerging modes of international trade.

Explores the potential and problems of bank safety and efficiency arising from the area of cross-border banking in the form of branches or subsidiaries with primarily only national prudential regulation. This book identifies the protection problems and discusses solutions, such as greater cross-border cooperation, harmonization and organizations.