Study Of East Asian Economic Integration In The Economic Globalization

Since 1990's, economic globalization and regional economic integration have become the two most important features of world economic development, which causes more and more profound influence on the world economy. Although East Asia economy, especially Chinese economy, have achieved an outstanding success after many years' development, it still falls far behind the rapid development of regional economy all over the world, especially European and North-American free trade areas. Under such background, it would mean more importance in theory and practice to make a research on the necessity and possibility of East Asia economy unification, and on how to realize the unification. This paper makes a research upon the above issues through the methodologies of institutional analysis, comparison, conclusion and deduction.Researches show that the regional economy unification is a result of economy internationalization and globalization, and at the same time it improves the economy globalization. So at this point, economy globalization and regional economy unification are both uniform and opposite in relationship. Regional economy unification plays an obvious role of model example, and pushes the transition of international economic competition from national competition to regional one. So East Asia economy unification becomes very necessary. Whether the regional economy unification is effective depends on its regional strength. Since East Asia has such kind of economic strength, its economic unification should be practical and feasible.Free trade area can cause trade creation instead of trade diversion more possibly than custom union, which provides theoretical foundation for East Asia economy unification to choose free trade area. Bilateral free trade is the foundation of multilateral free trade, which decides the East Asia economy unification should bebuilt within the frame of multilateral free trade through large scale of bilateral free trade development. Among East Asia economic units, the economic cooperation between China and ASEAN has very good conditions, and to build up a free trade area between the two will be not only feasible but also an essential breakthrough on the way to East Asia economy unification. It would be of fairly importance for East Asia economy unification. From the view of whole East Asia, China-ASEAN Free Trade Area is a practice of bilateral free trade theory, and the bilateral free trade is still feasible between any two state members at the same time.Although China-ASEAN Free Trade Area is of brilliant prospects, it faces some development obstructions. In order to push its healthy development, China and ASEAN should unify their cognitions and understandings and get rid of their competitive fears. They should take big efforts on promoting bilateral free trade within the Free-trade Area, expedite the establishment of domestic unified market within China, strengthen their political trust and promote an environment with bilateral understanding and bilateral friendly co-existence. All efforts should be made actively to shorten the economic development gap between members of China-ASEAN Free-Trade Area for their multilateral benefits, to coordinate relationships with countries outside of the area, to improve cooperation among China, Japan and Korea, and to increase understanding between China and the United States.