ASEAN Initiatives to Broaden Free Trade Agreements with East Asia

Abstract

ASEAN’s importance to the regional arena can be discerned from its dynamic trade development and integration policy as well as from a number of enterprising collaborative efforts at trading arrangements with East Asia. In the early nineties, ASEAN initiated its own trading area, known as the ASEAN free trade area (AFTA), which was then extended to become the ASEAN Economic Community by the end of the following decade. ASEAN’s initiative in creating AFTA attracted the attention of their dialogue partners. Once ASEAN members, were able to solve their problems resulting from the last Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, a new era of ASEAN’s trade development and integration with outsiders began. Since then, ASEAN members, individually and as a group, have embarked upon multiple bilateral, regional and sub-regional initiatives in pursuit of trading arrangements, known often as free trade agreements (FTAs) or sometimes comprehensive economic partnerships (CEPs) with other countries.