FTAs in Asia-Pacific: “Next Generation” of Social Dimension Provisions on Labor? Recent years have brought a proliferation of Free Trade Agreements (“FTA”), bilateral and multilateral, often regional, with even larger ones being negotiated, such as the European Union (“EU”) and United States (“U.S.”) Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Transpacific Partnership (TPP). The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (“APEC”) forum members recently discussed plans to “phase out regional free trade agreements” (or supplement them) in favor of creating a singular Free Trade Agreement Asia Pacific (“FTAAP”), covering much of the Asia Pacific Region. While inter-Asian business grows and FTAs flourish in and with Asia, the inclusion of social dimension provisions in FTAs or Bilateral Investment Treaties (“BIT”) is practically non-existent, except where the Western influence appears to dominate, and social dimension provisions are included, such as in FTAs with South Korea and with Singapore. The thesis of this paper is straightforward; there are workers throughout the world, particularly in developing countries, who are subjected to substandard labor standards, and their countries are targeted for investment because of their countries’ low wages or lax enforcement of labor laws. The existence of domestic labor laws and ratification of ILO Core Labor Conventions do not necessarily provide labor protection for the workers. Likewise, international treaty obligations under FTAs with social dimension provisions on labor do not necessarily bring labor protections. There are a number of emerging FTAs in the Pacific Region and the several very significant ones on the cusps of conclusion are discussed below so as to evaluate current approaches of labor protections by FTAs. This paper proposes the “new generation” of FTA social dimension provisions should embrace a marriage of international obligations, which incorporate mandates for private contractual remedies under International Framework agreements (“IFA”), CSRs, and Codes of Conduct, with the private obligations contractually enforceable by private parties.
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Pub Date : 2015-02-01DOI: 10.5089/9781484386491.001.A001
G. Almekinders, S. Fukuda, Alex Mourmouras, Jianping Zhou
The establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at end-2015 has brought into sharp focus the issue of financial and economic integration in the region. This paper takes stock of ASEAN’s financial integration and prospects. ASEAN integration could accelerate in the years ahead; it will likely be a safe, gradual process consistent with the “ASEAN way” of consensus decision-making. Properly phased and sequenced, closer financial integration has the potential to help increase real incomes and accelerate real convergence within ASEAN and narrow the region’s gap with advanced Asia. Realizing the promise of financial integration will require ASEAN countries to make long-term investments in financial infrastructure. Policymakers can draw on the experience of their more advanced peers and of other regions. Gradualism and safeguards should not be excuses for inaction or financial protectionism. Reliance on flexible policy frameworks and a strengthened and tested regional financial safety net should be part of the agenda. Closer engagement with the Fund could also help.
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I. Wahyudi, Rizky Luxianto, Niken Iwani, liyu Adhikasari Sulung
Asia’s financial crisis in July 1997 affects currency, capital market, and real market throughout Asian countries. Countries in southeast region (ASEAN), including Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, are some of the countries where the crisis hit the most. In these countries, where financial sectors are far more developed than real sectors and the money market sectors, most of the economic activities are conducted in capital market. Movement in the capital market could be a proxy to describe the overall economic situation and therefore the prediction of it could be an early warning system of economic crises. This paper tries to investigate movement in ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) capital market to build an early warning system from financial sectors perspective. This paper will be very beneficial for the government to anticipate the forthcoming crisis. The insight of this paper is from Hamilton (1990) model of regime switching process in which he divide the movement of currency into two regimes, describe the switching transition based on Markov process and creates different model for each regimes. Differ from Hamilton, our research focuses on index return instead of currency to model the regime switching. This research aimed to find the probability of crisis in the future by combining the probability of switching and the probability distribution function of each regime. Probability of switching is estimated by categorizing the movement in index return into two regimes (negative return in regime 1 and positive return in regime 2) then measuring the proportion of switching to regime 1 in t given regime 1 in t-1 (P11) and to regime 2 in t given regime 2 in t-1 (P22). The probability distribution function of each regime is modeled using t-student distribution. This paper is able to give signal of the 1997/8 crisis few periods prior the crisis.
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