Asia-Pacific FTAs: Country Profiles

Abstract

This chapter examines the FTA policies of eight Asia-Pacific countries visited by the author in which extensive research interview fieldwork was conducted. The field-research country group comprises Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.¹ These were chosen because they were amongst the first wave of important FTA protagonists when the Asia-Pacific FTA trend initially emerged. In total, 175 research interviewees from 144 agencies across the eight countries (plus the WTO community in Geneva) took part in field-research for this study, these being from amongst the government, business, civil society, research institute and foreign ambassadorial communities of the field-researched countries, and thus with a stakeholder or an analytical interest in FTA policy. Depending on the agency, each research interviewee was asked a series of questions that covered the following fundamental issues:

• What are the main determining factors behind the FTA policy?

• What are the main hindrances faced in advancing FTA policy? This forms part of a wider examination of the key challenging areas and contentious issues of the country’s FTA policy.

• What are the main consequences from the substantive development of FTA policy?

• How FTA policy fits into a wider economic and trade policy strategy?

• How is FTA policy itself formulated, including how the government works with different stakeholder groups in this process?