Blake C.Y. Wang[1]
Associate Professor of Law, National Taipei University
From the last few decades, Asian Countries experienced the economic development and trade liberalization. Under the new “wave” of regionalism, RTAs between Asian countries increased year by year. However, although the leaders of Asian countries tried to negotiate certain stable and suitable regional trade framework, there still long way to go. What is now known as the “Trade Law Identity”, there are NAFTA in North America, MECROCUR in South America, EU in Europe, ANZCERTA between Pacific Region, even ECOWAS and CEMAC in Africa. However, is there any fundamental RTA as law identity in Asia? The main propose of this article is try to explore this critical and controversial issue.
The first argument is to discuss what “Asia” is under geographical and legal means. In fact, ASEAN could be the best illustration of South East Asia regional economic integration, and ASEAN plus 3 (including China, Japan, and South Korea) expend the free trade area to North East Asia. However, the U.S. raised Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP) issue in recent years and many “Asia-Pacific” countries expressed highly interests via APEC forum. This article reviews the historical and theoretical documents to analysis these two different regional approaches of economic integration and finally argues the paradox of dual trade regimes.
The second argument concerns the substantive issues of trade law identity. Given the huge gap of economic development of Asian countries, what kind of RTA would be better for this region? And how can it success under negotiation table? This article based on “Core FTA Provision” approach to evaluate the structures and quality of existing RTAs (ex. ASEAN, ASEAN plus 3) and proposed RTAs (ex, TPP), such as Trade in Goods (intra-regional RoOs, trade remedy measures, TBT & SPS provisions), Trade in Service, Investment, Intra-Regional Dispute Settlement and Economic Regulations (IPRs, e-commerce, competition, environment and substantial development provisions).
The last section of this paper provides the observations and suggestions in order to consider “Asian-style RTA” as Asian Identity for Asian countries. This article encourage the Asian countries to establish intra-regional RTA instead of seeking for the wide range (geographically and legally) of illusory integration.
Key Words: Regional Trade Agreements (RTA), Free Trade Agreements (FTA), ASEAN, Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Regionalism
[1] Blake, Chen-Yu Wang, Associate Professor of Law, National Taipei University (Taiwan). The author is Secretary to the Dean at College of Law at National Taipei University, and Vice-Secretary of Chinese (Taiwan) Society of International Law. To contact the author, please e-mail to blakecyw@mail.ntpu.edu.tw or chenyu02@yahoo.com.
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