The New Rise Of Regional Trade Agreements And The Motivation Analysis

Since the end of 1990s, the New Rise of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and economic globalization has become the basic trend of world economy and trade. The new trends of RTAs are imposing great influences on global economic system and development. Among the total world trade volume, about 50-60% takes place between different RTAs. Therefore, the entitative changes of international trade are the fast growth of internal trade among RTAs. RTAs will push the development of economic globalization at least from two ways of both trade and investment in the next couples of years.Compared with RTAs before 1990s, the new RTAs takes on several significant features. Firstly, inter-continental and cross-ocean RTAs happen; Secondly, RTAs happen among nations with different social system and economic level; thirdly, one nation has multilayer and membership in different RTAs. Concurrently, the new RTAs also brings on many problems. For example, RTAs has created crucial challenges on multi-lateral trading system.In the past a few years, China has made so much progress in initiating RTAs with its neighboring countries. However, China still lags behind the global development due to its lower levels of RTAs. This limitation has great negative effects on China's progressing in RTAs. One of the major problems lie in institution and system associating with operational faults and subjectivism.Economic considerations are not only one fact of complex RTAs strategies being pursed by China, which often include broader foreign policy aims such as political and security considerations. China's integration into global RTAs is a complicated and giant project. China's general strategic RTAs goal is: first establishing big china free trade agreement, mainly designing RTAs with its neighboring nations and further constructing global cooperation networks with international community.The objective of this paper is to picture the evolving landscape of RTAs and to provide a brief update on recent developments, trends and directions. Three broad themes are explored:"RTA's kaleidoscope"looks at main trends and characteristics of RTAs, both in force, under negotiation and at the proposal stage."Motivations and Outcome"explores some of the underlying economic reasons why countries engage in RTAs. The fourth section focuses on China's policy option facing the new rise of RTAs.