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ABSTRACT
Of the recent transformations in the political economy of the Asia-Pacific, one of the most dramatic has been to the region's trade architecture. For many years, Asian government were committed trade multilateralists: pursuing liberalisation either globally through the GATT, or regionally via APEC's model of open regionalism. Underpinned by US and Japanese leadership, this system provided the foundation for the export-driven Asian economic miracle. But since the early twenty-first century, the system has been rapidly transformed. The proliferation of preferential trade agreements has threatened to undermine the cohesiveness of regional trade arrangements. The emergence of WTO-Plus style liberalisation, emphasising services, investment and intellectual property, marks the maturation of a system previously focussed on tariff reduction and manufacturing exports. Since 2011, competition between two ‘mega-regional’ proposals – the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – is also indicative of new splits which cut across traditional developmental divides. Growing geopolitical rivalry between the US and China has also raised question of who will lead the next round of liberalisation in the region. Exploring these new trends, this paper argues the trade architecture of the Asia-Pacific is entering is becoming more contested and fragmented, with major implications for economic regionalism in coming years.
Acknowledgement
Mireya Solís is grateful to Jennifer Mason for her excellent research assistance.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Mireya Solís
Mireya Solís is a senior fellow and the Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies in the Centre for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Solís earned a doctorate in government and a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor's in international relations from El Colegio de México. She is an expert in Japan's Foreign Economic Policies. Her main research interests include Japanese politics, political economy, and foreign policy; international and comparative political economy; international relations; and government-business relations. She also has interests in broader issues in USA–Japan relations and East Asian multilateralism. Her most recent book Dilemmas of a Trading Nation: Japan and the United States in the Evolving Trans-Pacific Order is forthcoming from Brookings Press.
Jeffrey D. Wilson
Jeffrey D. Wilson is a senior lecturer in international political economy in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University. He specialises in economic regionalism and resource/energy politics in the Asia-Pacific. He consults for governments in the region on trade, energy and security policy issues, and is a sought-after expert commentator on Asian international affairs in international media. He was the inaugural winner of the Australian Institute of International Affairs’ Boyer Prize (2012) for his work on the politics of China-Australia mining investment. His latest book is International Resource Politics in the Asia Pacific: The Political Economy of Conflict and Cooperation (Edward Elgar, 2017).