Over the past twenty years, functional economic integration has been progressing rather rapidly among the three major Northeast Asian countries. The share of intra-regional trade between China, Japan and Korea increased from 12.3 percent in 1990 to 22.5 percent in 2010. When Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan are added, the share of intra-regional trade of Northeast Asia (CJK+HMT) amounted to 37.3 percent in 2010.
In addition, the efforts to institutionalize Northeast Asian economic cooperation have also been made by the three countries. At the ASEAN+3 Summit Meeting, which was held in Manila in November 1999, the leaders of China, Japan and Korea met for historic gathering, and the Trilateral Summit Meeting has taken place annually since. Then, in Fukuoka in December 2008, the first independent Trilateral Summit Meeting took place outside of the ASEAN+3 framework, and the independent Trilateral Summit Meeting has become an annual event.
Furthermore, although the three Northeast Asian countries signed on to the economic regionalism bandwagon belatedly, they have concluded many FTAs, respectively. Yet, there is still no FTA among them.
However, some progress recently has been made. On the basis of the recommendation proposed by the Trilateral Joint Research, which was set up following the agreement among three leaders at the Manila Summit in 1999, the leaders agreed to launch an Official Tripartite Joint Study for a China-Japan-Korea FTA at the Trilateral Summit Meeting in Beijing in October 2009. Seven meetings of the Joint Study Committee for a CJK FTA were held between May 2010 and December 2011, and the outcome of this Joint Study Committee is planned to be submitted to the leaders at the Trilateral Summit Meeting in 2012.
When it comes to institutional economic integration in the region, it began after the Asian financial crisis. Following the first ASEAN+3 Summit Meeting which was held in December 1997, the Summit Meetings as well as Ministerial and Senior Officials Meetings have taken place regularly, constituting a framework for regional economic cooperation among the ASEAN+3 countries. Additionally, the East Asia Summit Meeting was launched in 2005.
Functional economic integration has also been advancing smoothly in East Asia. Over the past twenty years, the share of intra-regional trade among ASEAN+3 countries rose from 28.6 percent to 39.7 percent. In 2010, the share of intra-regional trade among ASEAN+3+HMT, ASEAN+6, and ASEAN+6+HMT represented 51.9 percent, 45.1 percent and 56.2 percent, respectively, surpassing that of NAFTA (40.5 percent) and nearing the level of EU (56.3 percent).
Furthermore, many bilateral and plurilateral FTAs have been concluded among East Asian countries since the turn of the century. In particular, ASEAN concluded FTAs with China, Korea and Japan, respectively.
With the proliferation of FTAs among the East Asian countries, the interest in a region-wide FTA in East Asia has risen. In fact, the idea of an EAFTA (East Asia Free Trade Area) was first recommended by the East Asia Vision Group in October 2001 and it was also proposed as a mid and long term goal by the East Asia Study Group in November 2002. Then, EAFTA Study among the experts from ASEAN+3 countries and CEPEA (Comprehensive Economic Partnership in East Asia) among the experts from ASEAN+6 countries were conducted, and on the basis of their recommendations, the four government - level working groups were established to prepare a region-wide FTA in East Asia. 
East Asia has already become the world’s factory. In the wake of the global financial crisis and the European fiscal crisis, given that the economic prospects for the United States and EU are remaining rather gloomy, East Asia is expected to be the engine of world economic growth. Moreover, if the rapid growth of East Asian economies continues, we may yet witness the start of East Asia era in the twenty first century.
This study proposes two criteria for the Era of East Asia; one is that the size of its economy should recover the level in 1820 (adjusted by the change in population), i.e., before its historic decline, and the other is that its average per capita income should attain the world’s average, and suggests it as a vision to be pursued by East Asian countries. 
To realize the era of East Asia, East Asia has to maintain its economic growth, enlarge internal markets and create a stable international political and security environment. And in order to satisfy all these conditions, we need a region-wide FTA in East Asia.
Given many FTAs among East Asian countries, including ASEAN+1 FTAs, the remaining missing links are among the three Northeast Asian countries. So, the most fundamental task to realize a region-wide FTA in East Asia is the formation of an FTA or FTAs between China, Japan and Korea.
This study highlights the fact that in order to realize the era of East Asia, a region-wide FTA in East Asia is needed, and that to achieve a region-wide FTA in East Asia, a CJK FTA is necessary. On the other hand, vision of realizing the East Asia era could be used as an additional stimulus to push forward the formation of a region-wide FTA in East Asia and CJK FTA.
Therefore, in order to realize the era of East Asia, China, Japan and Korea must strive to form a region-wide FTA in the mid and long term, and in the short term, they should focus on the formation of a CJK FTA.
The Korean government should also give priority to a CJK FTA over a Korea-China FTA or Korea-Japan FTA, and take the opportunity of the 2012 Trilateral Summit Meeting to launch the CJK FTA negotiations.  By choosing the trilateral FTA over the bilateral ones, the Korean government can show its will to assume an active role in improving relations in Northeast Asia.
 

This study examines the trends and forms of China’s ever-growing outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), and provides a case study as well as a business performance analysis on OFDI of major Chinese companies.
China’s OFDI has increased rapidly in recent years, making China the World fifth largest investing country in 2010. The outbound M&A by Chinese companies constituted 42.4% of the total OFDI in the same year. Although the majority of China’s OFDI was still concentrated in the energy/natural resources sector of certain Asian and African countries, M&A-based investment in technology, brands, and distribution networks of the US, EU, Japan and other developed countries has showed an upward trend.
China’s investments in developed countries (except Canada where China’s investments are natural-resource-oriented) are motivated mainly by companies’ market-seeking and technology acquisition strategies. As for investments in developing countries, they are basically aimed at natural resources and market penetration. In particular, while most of China’s OFDI in Africa was in natural resources (except South Africa where market-seeking OFDI prevailed), OFDI in ASEAN countries was mainly oriented towards entering their markets. The level of Chinese investment in Korea is marginal in comparison to bilateral trade volume between the two countries. China’s investment here is concentrated in the manufacturing sector, followed by services, and characterized by its small scale.
A case-study on OFDIs of major Chinese companies has revealed that their business performance was below expectation. Chinese companies present in Africa have suffered from poor investment environment there; Outbound M&A aimed at technology acquisitions in developed countries have failed due to the lack of management expertise of Chinese acquirers, resulting in worsened business performance of both Chinese adquirers and acquired companies. Representative examples are: M&A of France’s Alcatel by TCL, and M&A of Korea’s Ssangyong Motors and Hydis by Shanghai Motors and Jingdongfang Hightech respectively. Although those Chinese companies are powerful in their respective sectors, they have been engaged in M&A transactions with no account of their own capacities in technology, size, and management expertise. Moreover, Shanghai Motors and Jingdongfang Hightech were more interested in technology acquirement rather than improvement of the acquired company’s performance, which consequently worsened.
On the other hand, the acquisition of Korea’s Actoz Soft by Shanda, a Chinese online game company, is a success story of a relatively small-scale M&A which focused not only on the acquisition of the local company’s technology (intellectual property), but also the latter’s expansion and growth in the Korean market. Shanda’s case shows that China’s outbound M&A transactions in which size and technology level of acquired companies are modest enough to be controlled by Chinese acquirers tend to be more successful, rather than excessive large-scale M&As with Chinese government support.

Over the last several years, the number of FTAs has significantly increased. Even if the basic aim of many FTAs is to cut tariffs, an increasing number of agreements deals with environment. While advanced countries, such as the United States, the European Union and New Zealand, have included the most ambitious environmental provisions or chapters in FTAs, some developing countries also have made an efforts to include environmental provisions in their trade agreements. This is an ongoing learning process and countries can benefits from the previous experiences. Against this backdrop, this study examines environmental provisions in FTA texts of major countries including both advanced and developing countries, and addresses some key factors related to the environmental aspects of FTAs. Based upon these analyses, this study also reviews some policy implications for Korea's future FTA negotiations.

 

I. Introduction 

II. Regional Economic Integration and FTAAP 
1. Regional Economic Integration in the APEC Region 
2. Conditions for a Desirable FTAAP 

III. Feasible Scenarios for the Best Practiced FTAAP 
1. Comprehensive Application of Tariff Elimination in Goods Trade 
2. Liberalization of Trade in Services 
3. Enhancing Trade Facilitation 
4. Feasible Scenarios for the FTAAP 

IV. Measuring the Impact of FTAAP 
1. CGE Model 
2. Data 
3. Simulation Results 

V. Concluding Remarks 

References 

In order to argue that the proposed FTAAP is the second-best policy option for APEC member economies and the world economy com-pared to the stalled first-best multilateral liberalization effort like the DDA (Doha Development Agenda), we examine existing arguments for and against the proposed FTAAP. From our examinations, we find that the FTAAP is a sustainable RTA (Regional Trade Agreement) and will work as a stepping stone towards global free trade. In addition, the FTAAP will be a more desirable RTA if it is cooperated with the APEC’s principle of open regionalism or/and evolves to a customs union of the region. However, unlike traditional FTAs, the FTAAP has some APEC-specific impediments to its establishment of a regional trade bloc at present. Some policy recommendations would be proposed to overcome the obstacles.

I. Introduction 

II. Direct Measurement of Arbitrage Costs 

III. Arbitrage Costs and Relative Prices 

IV. Empirical Analysis 
1. Threshold Autoregressive (TAR) Model 
2. Results 

V. Implications for the PPP Puzzle 

VI. Conclusions 

References 

This paper estimates the arbitrage costs from international relative prices, and studies the economic determinants of implied arbitrage costs. We find that the magnitude of arbitrage costs depends on the characteristics of both the type of good and set of locations under examination. More specifically, higher share of non-traded input and lower tradability of good lead to larger arbitrage cost, as does a lower proximity of geographic distance between locations. The role of location-specific characteristic in accounting for the arbitrage cost is more significant as we move beyond an economic geography, while good-specific characteristics matter relatively more if we move to the interior of this geography. We also show that arbitrage cost plays an important role in explaining the puzzling behavior of real exchange rate. We view our evidence as complementary to those that emphasize the role of nominal price rigidities. 

 

I. Introduction 

II. Theoretical Argument of Convergence 
1. Theoretical Development of Convergence 
2. Previous Case of Convergence: Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal 

III. An Assessment of Convergence Patterns in the EU-27 
1. Measures of Convergence 
2. Cross-country and within-country convergence in the EU 

IV. Empirical Test on the European Regions 
1. Model Specification 
2. Data 
3. Results 

V. Conclusion 

References 

Appendix 
 

This paper examines income convergence across Europe during the period 1995~2007 where the last enlargement of the EU and the process of economic integration was in active progress. It is generally accepted that the enlargement of the EU has been followed by the convergence of late comers toward the European average. The author focuses on only the cross-county convergence, but also within-country convergence. He concluded that the remarkable cross-country convergence has tended toward within-country divergence, particularly for Central and Eastern European Countries during the enlargement period. Economic weights of the respective regions in national economies seem to be critical in explaining within-country divergence. High income regions, mostly capital cities, in CEECs are characterized particularly by higher growth rates. It is highly probable that the economic integration has favored those well-off regions at the expense of regions remote from their capitals.
This tentative conclusion provides important policy implications not only for European integration, but also for economic integration in other regions, where countries have been seeking diverse regional trade agreements (RTA). Economic integration is largely recognized as a policy option to boost economic growth through trade and investment channels, but economic benefits are likely to be concentrated in certain favored regions, mostly capital regions or industrial areas which have already been enjoying high income levels. Thus, it will be increasingly necessary to develop a mechanism to channel economic benefits to backward regions for within-country convergence.

 

I. Introduction 

II. Model 
1. Setup 
2. Stage 2 
3. Stage 1 

III. Equilibrium Analysis 
1. Position-dependent Best Responses 
2. Equilibrium Carbon Taxes 
3. Impacts of BCA 

IV. Discussion: Strategic Relationships between Home and Foreign Carbon Taxes 

V. Concluding Remarks 

References 

Appendix 
 

This article further develops a framework of Brander and Spencer (1984) by adding Border Carbon Adjustments (BCA) to compensate for cost differences caused by emissions reduction among countries. On a level playing field, BCA is one-directional in that only a country with a more stringent carbon tax can impose BCA on its imports. In a two-stage game with a reciprocal market model, governments move first by choosing domestic carbon tax rate on their own firms. The level of BCA is determined by both home and foreign carbon taxes. Firms take taxes and BCA as a given and compete by choosing either output levels or prices. The right to impose BCA makes two countries unequal in that a country with the right can extend the influence range of its domestic carbon tax on imports while the other cannot. Besides equalizing carbon costs across countries, BCA changes the incentive structure regarding governments’ domestic climate policy choices, as governments try to maximize their countries’ welfare. Our findings are robust whether the competition is Cournot or Bertrand because the effect by BCA dominates the mode of competition.

I. Introduction 

II. Empirical Methodology 
1. Empirical Specifications 
2. Data Description 

III. Empirical Results 
1. Main Results 
2. Robustness Checks 
3. Simulation 

IV. Conclusions 

References 

Appendix 

Recently, increasing numbers of financial MNEs are adopting English as their in-company official language. This paper attempts to investigate to what extent English proficiency, as the language of global business, can boost international trade in services. To achieve this purpose, this paper estimates the determinants of services trade including language variables with the aggregated and disaggregated data for nine different subsectors of OECD countries. The empirical model is based on a theory-based gravity model derived from Anderson and von Wincoop (2003, 2004). The findings show that English proficiency has a significant influence on services trade, while other languages such as French and German have only weak and mixed effects. In particular, communication, financial, commercial, insurance, and business services are revealed to be the most impacted by the level of English proficiency. The results imply that governments can use their English policies to promote international trade in services.

I. Introduction 

II. Asian Bond Markets Initiative 
1. Birth of the ABMI 
2. Development of the ABMI 
3. Credit Guarantee Investment Facility 

III. Model 
1. Households 
2. Production 
3. International Trade 

IV. Quantitative Experiments 
1. Scenarios of Credit Guarantee Schemes 
2. Measuring the Size of Shocks 
3. Simulation Results 

V. Concluding Remarks

References 

Appendix: Trade Matrix
 

This paper reviews current development of the Asian Bond Markets Initiative (ABMI) and addresses the macroeconomic effects of credit guarantee schemes through the Credit Guarantee Investment Facility (CGIF) along with the ABMI. The findings from international macroeconomic simulations include that (i) even though East Asian financial cooperation upgrades some countries’ credit fundamentals, it helps increase both the corresponding countries’ real GDP and East Asia’s regional real GDP, and (ii) this effect becomes greater as credit rating upgrade happens to more ASEAN+3 member countries in East Asia. These results strongly recommend that ASEAN+3 efforts along with the ABMI should move toward building local currency bond markets on the existing achievements. For the ABMI to be more effective, moreover, the importance of regional prudential supervision and regional market infrastructure is given with greater emphasis.  

I. Introduction  

II. Ethiopia Rural Household Survey and Poverty Profile  
1. Data: Ethiopia Rural Household Survey  
2. Poverty in Rural Ethiopia  

Ⅲ. Determinants of Poverty in Rural Ethiopia  

IV. Pro-poor Growth Analysis and Counterfactual Decomposition  
1. Pro-poor Growth and Growth Incidence Curve  
2. Counterfactual Decomposition of Growth Incidence Curve 

V. Concluding Remarks  

References  

Appendix  

 

Previous literature, ignoring regional heterogeneity, has mainly ex-plored the interrelationship among growth, inequality, and poverty. In exploring the incidence of poverty and growth, we classify rural Ethiopia into three regions based on the difference of production technologies and climates. We find evidence that regional heterogeneity exists across the three regions. To find the sources of heterogeneity, we estimate a pseudo-fixed effect probit model controlling for household fixed effects within a random effect probit model across regions. We find that poverty is determined by different sources across the three regions, each with different farming systems. Moreover, poor households can escape poverty only when their expected level of well-being has been improved by increases in asset holdings and/or returns to assets. Hence, we propose, using counterfactual decomposition, that pro-poor growth can be decomposed into two components: changes in the amount of attributes such as observable household assets or capital, and changes in ‘aggregate marginal product’ of the attributes. We find that the impacts of the changes in the aggregate marginal product on pro-poor growth are significant in the hoe area, but the changes in attributes do not significantly affect growth in this region. The aspects of growth are determined heterogeneously across regions: in the highland area, both components work together; in the hoe area, growth is mainly determined by changes in the aggregate marginal product; and in the enset area, it is changes in attributes that mainly determine the positive growth. We find evidence that pro-poor growth in a relative sense appear in the hoe area, where the impact of changes in the aggregate marginal product on growth is heterogeneous along the income distribution; the larger impact appears in the lower tails, while smaller impact can been seen in the upper tails. However, we find no evidence of pro-poor growth in the highland and the enset areas, where the impacts of the aggregate marginal product on growth are anti-poor and insignificant, respectively. Therefore, since the impact of changes in productivity on growth differs across regions, technology disseminated to increase household productivity should be tested whether it could generate pro-poor growth in the recipient’s environment. For example, in providing agricultural technologies through the Korea Project on International Agriculture (KOPIA) or new knowledge via the Knowledge Sharing Program (KSP), we have to deliberate carefully on whether the knowledge and technology do indeed have pro-poor aspects.