This book explores in-depth the major issues and important aspects of this economic recovery and its potential impact on growth, development, trade and investment. Expert contributors also discuss the global directions in international economic and financial relations, corporate and public governance and the challenges to be met and managed in the 21st century.

Asia has witnessed a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs) since the turn of the millennium. The first regional agreement — the ASEAN FTA — was transformed into the ASEAN Economic Community at the end of 2015. In the meantime, ASEAN forged five ASEAN+1 FTAs and began to negotiate a sixteen-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement. In parallel, the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), supporting U.S. foreign policy of “Pivot to Asia”, was broadly agreed in October 2015. The RCEP and the TPP are accompanied by other mega-regional integration processes developing elsewhere in the world, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership for the European Union and the United States, and the Pacific Alliance among four Latin American member states. Meanwhile, APEC is also striving to meet its Bogor Goal targets and create a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific. Each of these mega-regionals aims to achieve greater trade and investment liberalization and facilitation and more harmonized trade and investment rules so that all member economies can participate in the global value chain of production. Instead of undermining, these regional exercises can be building blocks for a more liberal global trading system supported by the World Trade Organization. This book ruminates on these regional agreements, their economic and strategic rationales and challenges during negotiations and afterwards. The book brings together eminent scholars and experts to deepen our understanding of the complex nature of the mega-regional trade agreements and their implications. It is useful both for the academic and research community and for policymakers who focus on trade and economic cooperation issues.

The Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) conference series has been at the forefront of analysing challenges facing the economies of East Asia and the Pacific since its first meeting in Tokyo in January 1968. The 38th PAFTAD conference met at a key time to consider international economic integration. Earlier in the year, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and the United States elected Donald Trump as their next president on the back of an inward-looking ‘America First’ promise. Brexit and President Trump represent a growing, and worrying, trend towards protectionism in the North Atlantic countries that have led the process of globalisation since the end of the Second World War. The chapters in the volume describe the state of play in Asian economic integration but, more importantly, look forward to the region’s future, and the role it might play in defending the global system that has underwritten its historic rise. Asia has the potential to stand as a bulwark against the dual threats of North Atlantic protectionism and slowing trade growth, but collective leadership will be needed regionally and difficult domestic reforms will be required in each country.

Much of the analysis of infrastructure's impact on trade costs focuses on conditions in developed countries. This book makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding by examining the situation in developing Asia, the world's most populous and fastest growing region. This study analyzes and draws policy implications from infrastructure's central role in lowering Asia's trade costs. Infrastructure is shown to be a cost-effective means of lowering trade costs and thereby promoting regional growth and integration. This book combines thematic and country studies, while breaking new ground in.

In recent years the tremendous growth of the service sector—including international trade in services—has outstripped that of manufacturing in many industrialized nations. As the importance of services has grown, economists have begun to focus on policy issues raised by them and have tried to understand what, if any, differences there are between production and delivery of goods and services. This volume is the first book-length attempt to analyze trade in services in the Asia-Pacific region. Contributors provide overviews of basic issues involved in studying the service sector; investigate the impact of increasing trade in services on the economies of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong; present detailed analyses of specific service sectors (telecommunications, financial services, international tourism, and accounting); and extend our understanding of trade in services beyond the usual concept (measured in balance of payment statistics) to include indirect services and services undertaken abroad by subsidiaries and affiliates.

ø Policy makers will benefit from the expert knowledge and policy lessons presented in this book, and development economists and researchers will profit from its critical examination of the world trading system. Undergraduate and postgraduate studen