Asia-Pacific FTAs: Country Profiles

This chapter examines the FTA policies of eight Asia-Pacific countries visited by the author in which extensive research interview fieldwork was conducted. The field-research country group comprises Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.1 These were chosen because they were amongst the first wave of important FTA protagonists when the Asia-Pacific FTA trend initially emerged. In total, 175 research interviewees from 144 agencies across the eight countries (plus the WTO community in Geneva) took part in field-research for this study, these being from amongst the government, business, civil society, research institute and foreign ambassadorial communities of the field-researched countries, and thus with a stakeholder or an analytical interest in FTA policy. Depending on the agency, each research interviewee was asked a series of questions that covered the following fundamental issues: What are the main determining factors behind the FTA policy? What are the main hindrances faced in advancing FTA policy? This forms part of a wider examination of the key challenging areas and contentious issues of the country’s FTA policy. What are the main consequences from the substantive development of FTA policy? How FTA policy fits into a wider economic and trade policy strategy? How is FTA policy itself formulated, including how the government works with different stakeholder groups in this process?