ABSTRACT
The Asia-Pacific region poses a number of puzzles for students of regional trade. Although no region-wide preferential trade arrangements exist in the Asia-Pacific, the share of intraregional trade in the total trade of Asia-Pacific economies is higher than within the most institutionalized of discriminatory regional schemes, the European Union.1 In 1997, APEC economies conducted 72% of their total trade with one another; for the European Union, the comparable figure was only 56%.2 Trade among Asia-Pacific economies has grown rapidly despite some economies retaining high-tariff and non-tariff barriers. This growth owes much more to the dynamism of the private sector in the region than to the actions of governments, acting either individually or in collaboration with one another. Rather than facilitating trade flows, in some instances governments did their best to obstruct them, for example during the longstanding ban on direct trade between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. Moreover, the region has been the location of some of the most contentious trade disputes in the global economy in the last two decades.
