Trade Effects in the Commodity Markets of the Asia-Pacific Region

The aim of the research is to assess long-term effects of trade integration in the Asia-Pacific region (APR) at the level of commodity markets - industrial and primary goods. Over the previous three decades, trade within the APR has significantly increased, thanks to the lowering of trade and economic barriers as a result of trade agreements and the WTO accession by almost all countries in the subglobal region. We show that trade between the Asia-Pacific countries greatly exceed their trade with other countries of the world, due to the increase in the exchange of goods, both primary and industrial goods including in the production chains of transnational corporations. Estimates derived from the gravity model indicate that in the long term the overall positive effect of trade integration in the APR is manifested through the complementarity of regionalization and globalization processes, with the dominance of the latter. The regionalization process stimulates an increase in most of the aggregate trade in industrial goods, while trade of primary goods is generated exclusively by globalization, which explains the motivation of a number of countries specializing in exports, including Russia, in their reluctance to expand trade agreements with other APR countries. The article points out that along with the process of regionalization, globalization in the Asia-Pacific region contributes to the expansion of trade in industrial goods, with the production chains of transnational corporations successfully functioning within the framework of trade agreements. The assessments also point to signs of the exhaustion of globalization as a source of increasing trade in industrial goods in the APR, which may be related to the fragmentation of the subglobal region as manifested in creating trade megaformats in recent years. We assume that under the current instability of foreign policy processes in the APR, the introduction of various kinds of restrictions can lead to the transformation of trade and economic relations in the sub-global region, manifesting itself in the redistribution of the accumulated benefits of integration for the Asia-Pacific countries.