Inter-Regional and Intra-Regional Trade in East Asia

Inter-Regional and Intra-Regional Trade in East Asia: Recent Developments and Aggregate Bilateral Trade Elasticities

East Asian countries have experienced dynamic structural change in regional trade during the 1990s. While intra-regional trade rapidly progressed within the region after the financial crisis, Asia accounts for a large portion of inter-regional trade volume, even after the crisis. In this paper, examinations of how interregional and intra-regional trade in five selected crisis countries, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Korea are evolved by looking at descriptive statistics, verifying the heterogeneity of trade composition, reviewing historical changes of international trade policies and some empirical analyses. This paper`s empirical results show that elasticities of export to external demand are much larger than those of the changes in relative price ratio. Therefore, even though regional currencies fall causing the terms of trade to change, the decline in external demand might offset the effects of changes in relative price ratio. Another empirical result indicates that strengthening the supply side might contribute to the promotion of inter-regional trade of these countries.