Overview: Deepening East Asian Economic Integration

The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the studies under an ERIA Research Project “Deepening East Asian Economic Integration” conducted FY2008, mainly with the aim to support ASEAN’s endeavor to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). The first part of the project was devoted to develop quantitative measures to provide several snapshots of the progress in selected key policy pillars in the AEC Blueprint, namely services liberalization, trade facilitation and investment liberalization. In order to facilitate the on schedule implementation of the AEC Blueprint, it is highly recommended to maintain, update and expand these quantitative measures as they are effective tools to visualize the progress in policy reforms consistent with the AEC Blueprint. The second part of the project consists of econometric studies on the impacts of globalization/economic integration on the performance of firms using micro data from manufacturing surveys in selected East Asian countries. The issues investigated include key aspects of economic integration such as the impact of fragmentation, learning-by-exporting, vertical and horizontal spillovers, and firms’ response to policy reforms. Based on the findings in this project, we present several policy recommendations and future research agenda to further the economic integration in East Asia.