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Given Canada’s extended geography and regional economic diversity, individual provinces have differing exposures to particular international trade agreements. We demonstrate this by estimating the impacts of the Canada-Korea free trade agreement on the province of Ontario, using a dynamic general equilibrium model to generate Canada-level impacts, which are then decomposed on the basis of partial equilibrium model simulations on a trade dataset in which Ontario is represented as a separate international trading entity. We show that geography and sectoral specialization matter and that general equilibrium effects must be taken into account in partial equilibrium assessments of sectoral impacts of major trade agreements.

While antidumping laws were originally developed as the international trade analogue of domestic competition or antitrust policies, most vestiges of competition policy disappeared early in their evolution. Nonetheless, the formal justification for modern antidumping practice remains founded on countering “unfair” trading practices and preserving competitive markets. We update and consolidate a relatively thin literature that has examined this issue formally. Applying a “likelihood of predatory practice” index to the European Union’s use of antidumping proceedings over the period 2001 to 2010, we find more antidumping cases that suggest competition policy concerns than do previous studies, although these are still a minority.

In the context of stalled multilateral trade negotiations, major trading economies are seeking free trade agreements (FTAs) to secure their market access objectives. Nowhere is this dynamic stronger than in East Asia, where a web of bilateral and plurilateral agreements is stitching together piecewise an Asian free trade area that could plausibly rival the EU and NAFTA trade blocs and where the possibility of a formal pan-Asian agreement has been raised. Taiwan has been largely excluded from this dynamic. However, with the June 29, 2010 signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, the possibility of Taiwan joining the FTA dance in East Asia would appear to have been greatly strengthened as the advocates had anticipated. This article considers the economic and trade implications of Taiwan's participation versus non-participation in an emerging East Asian trade bloc. We support our analysis with simulations using the GTAP computable general equilibrium model. The article finds ...

Since the heyday of "Asia consciousness" in Canada during the "year of the Asia Pacific" in 1997, when Canada served as chair of Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation, there has been a sense that Canada's economic relationship with Asia has languished, or at least has not lived up to its potential. This perspective has taken root even as the people-to-people linkages between Canada and Asia have widened and deepened through immigration, academic and student exchanges, tourism, and most recently through all manner of internet networks. The question of the strength of Canada's presence in Asia, and an examination of the causes of under-performance, if such is demonstrated, takes on added significance and urgency as we contemplate the global economy that will emerge from the current period of turbulence.Since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008, both exports and imports have plummeted worldwide at rates not seen since the disasters of the first half of the 20th century. For the most part, protectionism is not playing a significant role (although the "buy American" provision in the Obama administration's stimulus package has opened that door at least a crack and, in fact, the World Bank has reported that 17 of the G20 countries have engaged in protectionist measures, after making a commitment not to do so in their meeting in Washington in November 2008). The problem is the extent to which global trade and investment had previously succeeded in integrating production systems worldwide. Plunging demand for exports translated automatically into plunging demand for imported inputs. For example, in the case of China, which has been the linchpin of global integrative trade because of the exaggerated skew in its comparative advantage (size of workforce with basic skills at extremely low relative wages), both imports and exports in February 2009 plunged by around 25 percent year over year - even though China's domestic investment rose by about the same amount. What has happened to trade in the course of the crisis is in some sense the equivalent of the massive deleveraging process and the unwinding of carry trades that has shrunk financial balance sheets worldwide and rocked global financial systems.As the global economy recovers and international financial and industrial linkages are restitched, the overarching strategic issue posed for Canada concerns the pattern of global demand that will take shape in the ensuing recovery. If it involves, as it seems it must, a substantially greater amount of Asian demand and greater savings in the industrialized west, a solid foothold in Asian markets will be of vital importance.ASSESSING CANADA'S TRADE RELATIONSHIP WITH ASIA: A COMPARATIVE APPROACHThe general perception in Canada of the economic relationship with Asia prior to the onset of the global economic crisis is shaped heavily by Canada's trade statistics, which show imports from the major Asian economies rising steeply (up 170 percent in 2008 in Canadian dollar terms from their level in 1995), but exports lagging with a comparable cumulative growth of only 44 percent. Indeed, the ground lost during the Asian economic and financial crisis of 1997-98, when Canada's exports to these economies slumped by 28 percent, has only recently been recovered.However, a number of considerations suggest that a closer look is required before passing judgement on the strength and vitality of Canada's commercial relationship with Asia on this basis. First, the difference between export and import flows is amplified by the use of Canada's export statistics. Export statistics are less reliable than import statistics, in general, and often understate particular flows because of transhipment through third countries. More importantly, the size and intensity of bilateral trade flows are determined by a wide range of factors, including the supply capacities of the economies in question, which shape their comparative advantage in the international division of labour; the size of their markets, which determines overall demand levels; the relative prices and qualities of their factors of production; firm-level specific advantages (e. …

The world's first anti-dumping measure was introduced by Canada as a ‘special duty’ that could be levied administratively rather than being enacted. This paper describes the features of this first measure in light of subsequent evolution of anti-dumping practice and sets it in its historical context – an era that was a high season of globalisation but also an era marked by an awakening of economic nationalism in newly industrialising countries, and by growing angst over the power of large corporations that were emerging to exploit the economies of scale allowed by mass production, as evidenced by the concurrent evolution of anti-combines legislation. Anti-dumping's early integration into economic theory as an international counterpart of domestic competition policy has received some official ratification in international treaties, and governments see it as a legitimate policy, albeit one in need of international disciplines. However, analysis of the pattern of its use reveals it to be an instrument of political economy, as a convenient alternative to the WTO safeguard option. The paper explores contextual reasons why today, in another high season of globalisation, marked by concerns over corporate globalism that evoke those of the earlier era, anti-dumping actions are proliferating where they did not then.

he idea of an East Asian economic zone, first proposed in the late 1980s, T showed few signs of becoming a reality through economic diplomacy alone. In 1997, however, capital markets treated East Asia as a distinct region, with contagion from Thailand sweeping first through Southeast and then Northeast Asia. As liquidity supply from international capital markets dried up, several currencies went into free fall, at times fluctuating wildly. Currency devaluations against the dollar also resulted in large changes in cross-rates against other East Asian currencies, straining regional trade relationships and serving as a conduit for contagion. Compared with Europe's currency crisis of 1992-1993, Asia's was much more chaotic, and the ensuing economic downturn was much deeper. This raises the question of whether a regional exchange rate mechanism modeled on Europe's would have permitted a less-turbulent adjustment of Asian currencies in 1997. Although there have been no moves in that direction so far,' the crisis did give rise to closer cooperation among Asian monetary authorities, the idea of an Asian Monetary Fund, and consideration of deeper regional economic ties. Exchange rate regimes are particular to the political and economic circumstances of their age. The international gold standard came into being because of the historical accident that gold was Britain's monetary standard when it emerged as the world's leading industrial, colonial, and trading power in the 1800s. Growth in trade made it convenient for other countries to adopt the British monetary standard, and the massive expansion of gold production from around 1850, following discoveries of gold in the United States and Australia, made it possible.2 Britain's stable balance of payments, an important factor anchoring the system