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Reciprocal Trade Agreements in Asia: Credible Commitment to Trade Liberalization or Paper Tigers?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2016

Raymond Hicks  and
Soo Yeon Kim
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Reciprocal trade agreements (RTAs) have proliferated rapidly in Asia in recent years, an unprecedented phenomenon in a region in which state-led institution-building efforts were largely unsuccessful during the Cold War years. In this article, we investigate the qualitative provisions of RTAs in Asia, focusing on agreements that are professedly geared toward trade liberalization through reciprocal exchanges of trade concessions. We build on the concept of credible commitment—that states “tie their hands” through international agreements and thus signal strong commitment to trade liberalization. We argue that a broad range of agreement provisions will affect an RTA's ability to achieve its primary objective: trade liberalization. We present a coding scheme that measures the strength of a wide variety of provisions in the legal texts of RTAs. Using quantitative analysis, we analyze the impact of various components of Asia's RTAs on participants' trade flows.

Keywords

trade agreementsAsiatradecredible commitment
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of East Asian Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © East Asia Institute 

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