A Comparison of De Jure Economic Integration in East Asia: Is East Asia Discriminating Against Itself?

Thanks to the successive rounds of multilateral trade negotiations under the GATT/WTO, barriers to international trade as measured by multilateral tariffs have strongly decreased over the last decades, and tariff rates applied to trading partners have converged due to the application of the Most Favored Nation (MEN) regime. At the same time, however, understanding trade policy and market access issues has become very complex and the policies of countries often appear to be discriminatory, because of special conditions granted to developing countries (Generalized Systems of Preferences, GSP) and the least developed countries (LDC), and because of the proliferation of often overlapping regional and bilateral trade arrangements (Cernat and Laird 2003; Pangestu and Gooptu 2004).