Regional Trade Agreement and International Trade An Empirical Study of ASEAN

This paper analyses the actual impact of import tariffs and of ASEAN membership on trade flows of ASEAN member countries and non-member countries. The Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) econometric model is used to obtain consistent estimates in the presence of heteroscedasticity. Three groups of fixed effect variables are used to address concerns related to omitted control variables. The findings show that, while low import tariffs promote imports of the member countries, they also boost exports from the member countries. More interestingly, the effect spills over to the non-member major trade partners even though the impact is more prominent for member countries, which can be attributed to ASEAN's recent efficiency improvements. This study also sheds light on the prospect of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on account of the overlap between RCEP and ASEAN.