Looking Toward the “New Era” Features and Background of the Japan-Thailand Economic Partnership Agreement

This paper examines Thai-Japanese relations through analysis of EPA. There are two questions. The first involves the features of JTEPA as an EPA. By scrutinizing the features of the EPA, we would like to approach the institutional framework of the “new era” which will be brought about by JTEPA. The second question is how did the governments of Thailand and Japan come to conclude JTEPA? By reviewing the focal points of the negotiations, we will describe the background of the formation and aims of JTEPA. Finally, we conclude that JTEPA is a culmination of the existing Thai-Japanese relations, and was built based upon the existing divergence of economic institutions. At the same time it upgrades the bilateral partnership to a framework for multilateral cooperation by considering assistance toward Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar and Vietnam. The author would like to emphasize that JTEPA was designed based on the idea of a further integration of CLMV and Thailand, an original member of ASEAN.

Re-thinking Argentina's labour and social security reform in the 1990s : agreement on competitive corporatism

This paper will analyze the Menem administration's social policy reforms during the 1990s. Neo-liberal reforms in Argentina are well-known both in the economy and in the social arena, but in the latter we can discern the presence of tripartite negotiations. The form of such negotiations, the type of agreements reached as a result, and the background to those agreements will be discussed. We also pay attention to the concept of competitive corporatism, which was established under the increase in market competition brought about by globalization.

Measuring fixed costs for firms' use of a free trade agreement : threshold regression approach

In this paper, by employing the threshold regression method, we estimate the average tariff equivalent of fixed costs for the use of a free trade agreement (FTA) among all existing FTAs in the world. It is estimated to be 3.2%. This global estimate serves as a reference rate in the evaluation of each FTA’s fixed costs.

Selection and utilization of the early harvest list : evidence from the Free Trade Agreement between China and Taiwan

In this paper, we conducted an empirical investigation into the determinants of FTA utilization in exports from Taiwan to China. To do this, we first estimated the selection equation to see what kinds of products are included in the early harvest list. As a result, we found that Taiwan includes products with a medium magnitude of benefits from tariff removal in the early harvest list. Taiwan also includes products for which ASEAN countries have better access to the China market. We then estimated the equation for the determinants of FTA utilization by introducing an inverse of the Mills ratio estimated in the selection equation. The findings are that, as usual, the FTA rates are more likely to be utilized for products with a larger tariff margin. In addition, some rules of origin are found to be relatively restrictive in terms of discouraging trade.

Some practical guidance for the computation of free trade agreement utilization rates

The literature on the use of free trade agreements (FTAs) has recently been growing because it is becoming more important to encourage the use of current FTAs than to increase the number of FTAs. In this paper, we discuss some practical issues in the computation of FTA utilization rates, which provide a useful measure to discover how much FTA schemes are used in trade. For example, compared with the use of customs data on FTA utilization in imports, when using certificates of origin data on FTA utilization in exports, there are several points about which we should be careful. Our practical guidance on the computation of FTA utilization rates will be helpful when computing such rates and in examining the determinants of those rates empirically.