By IANS,
Chennai : Free trade agreements (FTA) among Asian countries will proliferate following the collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations, a Singapore-based economist said here Friday.
“Asia could be a noodle bowl of FTAs. There will be multiple hubs and spokes network of overlapping FTAs,” said Denis Hew, senior fellow and coordinator of regional economic studies at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.
“Over the past 10 years, there has been a proliferation of FTAs in Asia. There were around 107 FTAs, concluded and under negotiation, at the end of 2007,” Hew said at a seminar here.
The FTAs are more comprehensive going beyond trade in goods to services, investments, capital movements and others, he said at the seminar titled `Sustaining Asia’s Growth: Challenges and Opportunities’, organised by the Australian High Commission.
As an FTA is a market-driven trade integration mechanism offering an option for trade liberalisation, Hew said nations signing FTAs will have a domino effect, forcing neighbouring countries to sign similar treaties.
Listing out the advantages of FTAs, he said such bilateral trade treaties provide the training ground for complex trading agreements while motivating broader domestic policies like opening up of sectors.
However, Hew emphasised, FTAs ought to be compliant with WTO deals.