RULES OF ORIGIN AND AUTOMOTIVE SECTOR IN JAPAN’S ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENTS

Abstract

This paper examines complicated Rules of Origin (RoO) in Japan’s Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) with East Asian countries. To limit the scope of this research, the paper concentrates on automotive industries in ASEAN4 only. The reason is that, this industry is the world’s largest manufacturing activity and had long been protected in Malaysia, liberalized but with limited market access in Thailand, and growing in Indonesia with majority players are the Japanese automakers. The main question that this paper tries to answer is whether these countries should create a different and standardize the existing set of RoO in order to increase the utilization of FTAs with other partner countries. Complex rules in RoO have several implications on Japanese automotive production network when EPAs coming into force. Next, this paper discusses how to understand RoO among automotive related firms and at the same time promote automotive industry in ASEAN to develop to the world class levels

Keywords

• rules of origin, automotive, FTA, Japan, ASEAN

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