40 :: Trans-Pacific Trade, Integration, and Development: The Perspective from Asia
Asia’s trade and investment cooperation and has proposed a comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPEA). Future economic cooperation in East Asia, leading to an East Asian Economic Community, is likely to evolve around the multiple groupings under ASEAN, ASEAN+1’s, ASEAN+3, and EAS (or ASEAN+6). It is likely that the ASEAN Economic Community, to be created by 2015, will be the hub of East Asian economic integration, thereby ensuring ASEAN’s role as the driving force, ASEAN+3 as the main vehicle for an eventual East Asian Economic Community, and the EAS as an integral part of the overall evolving regional architecture (Kawai, 2007). APEC and ASEM as Trans-Regional Forums Established in 1989, APEC has encouraged trade and investment liberalization in a voluntary and unilateral fashion within an Asia-Pacific context. Australia played a major role in promoting APEC as a trans-regional forum with the basic principle of “open regionalism.” One of APEC’s most important achievements was to promote unilateral, voluntary trade liberalization among the then non-WTO members, such as PRC and Taipei, China. But APEC’s prominence appears to have declined since the Asian financial crisis due to its inability to effectively respond to the crisis and its members’ have pursuit of bilateral and sub-regional FTAs. Open regionalism can remain important, nonetheless, if APEC members view APEC and WTO principles as a liberalization infrastructure for their FTAs and attempt to go beyond them. The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), created in 1996 as a forum for AsiaEU economic cooperation, has not been active as a forum for trade and investment liberalization, but has the potential to serve as a vehicle connecting East Asia with Europe.
Spillovers for Latin American and the Caribbean There is little doubt that the process of East Asian global and regional integration is beginning to have a variety of spillover effects on other developing regions including Latin America. Growing linkages between East Asia and Latin American economies are perhaps remarkable in view of the relatively few historical or cultural ties and geographical distance between the two regions. This underlines the fact that international trade, investment, and other forms of economic integration are powerful forces for change across borders, and that countries need to adapt to reap the benefits.
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