Trade Effects Of Asean Regional Cooperation In Trade Research

In the era of rapid development in globalization and regional cooperation, all countries, especially the developing countries, face the same issue of how to integrate with the world economy. Today the following questions have become the major concern: How to evaluate the effects on trade in regional trade arrangements (RTAs) among the developing countries? What are the limitations in RTAs and their causes? What would be the way out for RTAs in the future? ASEAN trade cooperation has been chosen as a case for study on the above-mentioned issues.The dissertation employs several models in empirical studies, such as Balassa model, gravity model, intra-industry index, and revealed comparative advantage (RCA).The main conclusion is that ASEAN trade cooperation has not led to a large increase in intra-regional trade, mainly due to the small domestic markets, similarity in industrial structure and export products, more competitiveness than complementarity, heavy dependence on extra-regional economies, and so on.However, ASEAN trade cooperation contributes to the increase of intra-industry trade in intra-regional trade, and most of the growth in intra-regional trade is attributable to intra-industry trade. What's more, through the regional trade cooperation, the products of intra-ASEAN trade are more capital-intensive and technology-intensive. The results suggest that ASEAN trade cooperation contributes to the improvement of regional horizontal division of labour and the upgrading of industrial structure.In order to deal with the weakness and challenges in ASEAN RTA, ASEAN has to engage in larger scale of cooperation and East Asian cooperation would be a better outlet for it.This dissertation is arranged as follows: Background information on the AFTA, specifically on the CEPT scheme and its implementation, is provided in chapter one. Chapter two performs literature survey on regional integration and describes the concept of those models. The next chapter, chapter three is the central part of this dissertation, where several models are employed in empirical tests. Based on the results, chapter four reveals the weakness of ASEAN trade cooperation. And three initiatives to engage in larger scale of economic cooperation for ASEAN are discussed in chapter five. Conclusions and inspiration are drawn in the end.