Asian Integration and Its Implications for the EU “Post-Doha”^*

Asian economic cooperation and integration has become a key fixture of the global economic landscape in the 21st century. Over the past decade Asian economies established a large number of bilateral and a few sub-regional free trade areas that have facilitated the rise in intra-regional trade and regional production networks. More recently, the region has been active in embracing regionwide accords. The EU has been essentially left out of this process. This paper considers the economic costs of EU exclusion from the economic cooperation initiatives in Asia. It finds that, although on the whole the effects will be small, the EU could face significant trade diversion at the commodity level.