Economic Integration of East Asian Countries
Multilateral economic cooperation in East Asia has a long history. ASEAN was founded 50 years ago, and the financial crisis of 1997-1998 intensified the integration processes among ASEAN+3. Although there is no common free trade or investment agreement between all the ASEAN+3 countries, trade and investment barriers within East Asia are gradually eliminated. So it promotes the growth of trade and investment flows within the region. Liberalization leads to the appearance of the effects of trade and investment creation and diversion. Within ASEAN the appearance of the effect of investment creation is 10 times more intense than in ASEAN+3. However, there are no changes in the FDI structure in fa-vor of regional investors and East Asian countries are still over dependent on the "outside" capital flows. The appearance of the effects of trade creation and diversion within ASEAN is similar to investment ones