Managing the Noodle Bowl: The Fragility of East Asian Regionalism

By Richard E. Baldwin. 2008

378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile since (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of 'Factory Asia' - in particular on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created 'Factory Asia' is not subject to WTO discipline (bindings); (iii) there is no 'top-level management' to substitute for WTO discipline, i.e. to ensure that bilateral trade tensions - tensions that are inevitable in East Asia - do not spillover into region-wide problems due to lack of cooperation and communication. This paper argues that the window of opportunity for East Asian 'vision' was missed; what East Asia needs now is 'management' not vision. East Asia should launch a 'New East Asian Regional Management Effort' with a reinforced ASEAN+3 being the most likely candidate for the job. The first priority should be to bind the region's unilateral tariff cuts in the WTO.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/327040a9e40988457de3a533479ee2f4d9d8eac0

Citations in the corpus

• Are Free Trade Agreements Contagious (2012, neutral): “See Baldwin (1994, 1997, 2008) for applications to, respectively, the waves of regionalism in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and East Asia.”