The Market Driven Trade Liberalisation and East Asian Regional Integration

This paper creates a new index (“index of bilateral trade relation”) to quantitatively evaluate the degree of regional economic integration based on countries’ de facto bilateral trade relations. It concludes that a fundamental arrangement of East Asian regionalism should involve at least one of the two “hub” candidates – Japan and China. It also suggests that the China-ASEAN FTA (CAFTA) may trigger domino effects of regionalism in East Asia.