The Selection Behavior Of Institutional Member States And The Construction Of The Asia-Pacific Multilateral Trading System

This dissertation focuses on two observations. First, many member states of thesame multilateral East Asia economic insititutions have chaged their roles during theprocess of East Asia Integration (EAI). Second, member states show some similarbehavior patterns, they are consistentlyproactively participating or hold a negativeattitude toward a certain institutions, especially at some critical junctures. With thesetwo observations considered, the study question is: why the member states showsimilar participating patterns? Usually, the explaination of states changingparticipation patterns lie in discussion of the relationship between the builder and themanuplator. This dissertation provides “internal choosing behavior” as the coreconcept to explain the changes of member states' participation patterns.Using the explaination framework of “institutions effectively provide East Asiaregional public goods”,It assumes that, member states choose to support or abandon acertain insititution based on the judgement of whether a certain institution effectivelyprovides regional public goods (RPG), at this dissertation, RPG refers to East Asiafree trade, tarriff cutting is the standard to measure the institutions' effectivity ofproviding East Asia RPG, that is: when the insitutution helps with tariff reductions,member states choose to support, and vise versa.The dissertation takes four cases to verify member states'paticipation patterns.The four cases are Japan, China, the United States and Australia. With theconsiderarion of diversifying identities of member states, the four cases covers thesuper power of East Asia system (the United States), the regional power of East Asia(Japan and China), and extra-territorial power (Australia)The dissertation analyses the changes of participation patterns by taking theinstitutional forming of of EAI as the study background, the contents and forms of theEast Asia free trade liberalization as the study objects.With the perspective ofhistorical institutionalism, the dissertation trys to discuss the future forms of EAI.The conclusions of the dissertation are the following: first, if the multilateral freetrade institutions could effectively cutting tariff, lowering the market entrance, promoting free trade in East Asia, member states would take an attitude of proactiveparticipation to build such institutions. Second, if institutions failed to satisfy memberstates'expectation of East Asia free trade liberalization, the member states would takea negative attitude, abandoning and seeking other subtitutional institutions. Third, ifmember states believe the new trade rules could effectively promote free trade, theywould proactively join in building institutions with such rules. Fourth, there existsleading states which have power to disturb institutional evolution on the process ofeffectively providing regional public goods. The participation patterns of the leadingstates, such as support, ignorance or betrayal, decide the future of insititutions theyparticipate.