The benefits of full trade liberalization and accessibility RCEP for Thailand's export potentials

- 1 January 2019

Trade topics: Regional Integration, Trade Modelling, Trade Policy

This paper aims to investigate Thailand’s export potentials in the ASEAN+6 countries, due to a “full liberalization and accessibility scenario” within the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The methodology used is that of “filtering” statistical country data on macro-economic performance and imports following the Decision Support Model (DSM). The macro-economic data used are from the World Bank and the countries’ imports data are from the 2017 CEPII BACI data set. The export potentials thus identified are the base line in the further analysis. Next, potential exports under a “full liberalization and accessibility scenario” are calculated and compared with the base line export potentials. It is found that when all entry and accessibility barriers for traded goods are removed under RCEP, the most interesting realistic export opportunities (REOs) are in countries where they will increase most (Cambodia and Vietnam). In countries where the potential export revenue is high, like in China, Korea and Japan, the export potential value will increase less than the number of REOs, but will lead to a large export revenue. It is concluded that the Thai exporters and Thailand’s export promotion agency should concentrate on the REOs in the RCEP countries offering the higher export revenue.

 

[The paper has been published in the collected proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advancement of Development Administration 2019 - Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies]

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