ISAS Working Papers

In the past two decades, most economies in the world have entered into various kinds of regional and bilateral agreements. These include free trade agreements, preferential trade agreements, economic cooperation and economic partnership agreements, among others, and are between countries with similar as well as vastly different levels of development, and both within and across regions. Since 1995, the number of notifications of such Preferential Trading Agreements (PTAs)2 to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proliferated with the number exceeding 220 in 2005.3 However, the number of PTAs that have not been reported to the WTO is even larger. Of those that have been notified, a total of 185 agreements were concluded between 2000 and 2007 alone, or just under half the total number of agreements that were concluded during the entire twentieth century, indicative of the spurt that has been witnessed in regional integration in recent years