Endnotes

¹Integrating Asia includes Brunei Darussalam; Cambodia; People's Republic of China; Hong Kong, China; India; Indonesia; Japan; Republic of Korea; Lao People's Democratic Republic; Malaysia; Myanmar; Philippines; Singapore; Taipei,China; Thailand; and Viet Nam. See Appendix Table 1 [ PDF 78.8KB | 1 page ] for basic economic statistics of the economies in Integrating Asia.

²According to the Organization of American States, its 34 members (including the US and Canada) had 75 concluded FTAs in early December 2008 (www.sice.oas.org). This compares with 16 Asian countries with 54 concluded FTAs.

³More complete explanations can be found in Kawai (2005 and 2007) and ADB (2008).

⁴Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam.

⁵Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam.

⁶We are grateful for Richard Baldwin for this suggestion.

⁷In Singapore's case, the high ratio reflects a proactive strategy of concluding a large number of bilateral and ASEAN FTAs. In Lao PDR and Brunei Darussalam, this ratio may suggest high commodity dependence and market concentration in a limited export base.

⁸For an overview of the firm surveys, see Kawai and Wignaraja (2009b). The firm surveys for the individual countries will be published by ADBI as working papers and later as a book.

⁹The data exclude four agreements involving Latin American countries for which texts were not available in English.

¹⁰Accordingly, Lao PDR excludes 5 items, Viet Nam 7, Malaysia 16, Philippines 17, Indonesia 24, and Cambodia and Myanmar 36 each. In contrast, Brunei Darussalam and Singapore eliminated tariffs on all agricultural products.

¹¹An early review of 11 Asian agreements concluded that "modern FTAs in Asia, some of which are the most sophisticated in the world, have tended to be more comprehensive in terms of coverage and of the building bloc rather than the stumbling bloc type, though there are some (minor) exceptions in terms of certain components" (Plummer, 2007: 1795). The study suggested a set of best practices to guide future FTAs.

¹²ECOTECH is the APEC schedule of programs designed to build capacity and skills in APEC member economies to enable them to participate more fully in the regional economy and the liberalization process. See http://www.apec.org for more information.

¹³From Kawai and Wignaraja (2009a). These estimates are from the CGE model developed in Francois and Wignaraja (2008).

¹⁴As Lee, Owen, and van der Mensbrugghe (2009) observed, a worthwhile but difficult extension of CGE models on region-wide Asian FTAs would be to endogenize FDI flows involving Asian countries. Consistent data on bilateral FDI flows in Asia, however, are lacking.

¹⁵Interestingly, Korean farmers do not seem threatened by the Korea–US FTA, but express concerns on agriculture with regard to a Korea–PRC FTA.

¹⁶The Transpacific SEPA was previously known as the Pacific Three Closer Economic Partnership (P3-CEP), with its negotiations first launched at the 2002 APEC Leaders' Summit.

¹⁷Changing APEC's mandate into a prospective FTA organization, however, would likely encounter strong oppositions from many middle-income ASEAN countries.

¹⁸The US has joined ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, which is a significant political step for the relationship between the two. This can lay a strong foundation for the US to become a legitimate ASEAN+1 partner.

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