Professor Christopher Dent observes a protest against FTAs on the streets of Seoul, South Korea.
Professor Christopher Dent is an international political economist who specialises in the regional economic affairs of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. In 2001, he started to investigate the then emerging new trend of free trade agreements (FTAs) in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific, especially its impact on regionalism and regional community-building. After securing an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) research grant in 2001, he began to conduct fieldwork across the East Asia and Asia-Pacific region on its new FTA trend. A free trade agreement has traditionally been a legal treaty between signatory countries to reduce barriers of trade between them. However, these days they can be much more complex than that, and their impact and significance in the region is now very considerable. In 1997, no East Asian country had concluded a free trade agreement, and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific only seven FTAs were operating in Oceania and Pacific America (see this diagram). By 2004, though, 15 FTA projects had been initiated in East Asia (6 concluded) and in the wider Asia-Pacific region a total of 68 initiated projects and 31 concluded (see this diagram). This trend has continued, and by the end of 2008 a total of 19 FTA projects had been initiated within East Asia (15 concluded) and 86 initiated projects in the wider Asia-Pacific with FTA talks concluded on 60 agreements (see this diagram). These agreements not only shape international trade and investment flows within the region but also the very nature of international relations amongst East Asian and Asia-Pacific nations. They can furthermore have a deep economic, political and social impact at the domestic or local level. The project's main research questions have been:
Professor Christopher Dent in Singapore, East Asia's most active FTA player in the region.
These questions formed the basis of Christopher Dent's field research, and to date he has conducted around 250 research interviews with stakeholder representatives from government, business, civil society organisations, foreign ambassies, international organisations and research institutes. Field researched economies have thus far included Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Ausrtralia, New Zealand, United States and Chile. He has also conducted research interviews with World Trade Organisation, European Commission and British Government officials on FTAs. Christopher Dent initially devised a hypothesis and concept of 'lattice regionalism' for this research. As the vast majority of FTAs were bilateral (i.e. involving just two partners, for example Japan and Singapore), to what extent would an increasingly dense pattern of such bilateral links formed within the region work either for or against regional community-building efforts? As Professor Dent's research developed, he became more convinced that FTAs were having or would have a net negative effect on regional community-building. This was largely due to how they were aggravating inter-state rivalry in the region, reinforcing power asymmetries in international relations, undermining the cohesion of existing regional organisations and frameworks, and potentially exacerbating the development divide between the region's rich and poorer nations. This being said, there are potentially good prospects for an East Asia regional FTA emerging over forthcoming years but this depends on whether Japan and China can agree on forming a common model agreement.   One of Christopher Dent's most recent works has focused on how Asia-Pacific FTAs have become less concerned with removing conventional trade barriers, such as import tariffs, and increasingly more focused on issues of commercial regulation, namely establishing common rules on investment, government procurement, competition law, intellectual property rights, various technical standards and rules of origin. This, he argues, could lead to intensifying competition for regulatory influence between the Asia-Pacific's major powers of China, Japan and the United States, and also significantly shape the fundamental nature of international trade relations between developing and developed countries in the region. In another more recent work, Christopher Dent contends that with the likelihood of a regional FTA being some way off and Asia-Pacific nations fast running out of viable new bilateral FTA partners, countries will look in the future to transform existing FTAs into broader kinds of bilateral economic agreements that will encompass various 'trade plus' issues such as energy security. Key publications related to this research include:
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Free Trade Agreements in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific |