Chong Soo Yuen () (Singapore Centre for Applied and Policy Economics, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore) Jung Hur () (Department of Economics, National University of Singapore)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
The proliferation of overlapping free trade agreements (FTA) in the recent years has led to hub-and-spokes (HAS) throughout the world. Being avid subscribers to FTAs, many countries in the Asia-Pacific region including the USA, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Australia have become trade hubs to their partners who are in turn relegated to spoke status. In this paper, we question whether being a hub is welfare optimal for a small and open economy like Singapore compared to membership in a single bilateral FTA or a multi- member free trade zone. Within this context, we use a computable general equilibrium model to examine the welfare implications of the triangular trade relationship of the USA, Singapore and Japan. This is facilitated by the Japan- Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement, the USA-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, and a hypothetical USA-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. The analysis is extended to incorporate “super-hub” effects; that is, the spoke countries can be trade hubs in other HAS systems. The experiment reveals that hub status generates positive welfare gain and is the highest Singapore can get from the trade configurations considered. Meanwhile, Japan loses more than the USA when both are relegated to spoke status. These findings prove robust under different market structures and production technologies, deeper economic integration, “super-hub” effects, as well as, uncertainty in the key model parameters and the extent of trade liberalisation shocks.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.